Flaws in Kentucky's court system can lead to injustice, tragedy

Today's Stories • Flaws in Kentucky's court system can lead to injustice, tragedy

FRANKFORT, Ky. — Justice in Kentucky is dispensed unequally because of differences among judges and prosecutors and a lack of state oversight that has allowed thousands of felony cases to stall, to disappear or to be dismissed for lack of prosecution.

As a result, defendants and their alleged victims sometimes wait years for their cases to be heard. And sex offenders, drug dealers and other criminals are allowed to go free.

An eight-month investigation of the state's criminal-justice system by The Courier-Journal found that some criminal cases took up to two decades to complete and that cases languished, both before and after they reached the grand jury, through neglect, design or mismanagement.

More than 600 cases have been dismissed since 1995 in Franklin County alone after lying dormant for years without attention from prosecutors or the courts. More than two dozen of those defendants had admitted guilt.

Hundreds of felony indictments piled up in Pike County, in part because judges and the commonwealth's attorney couldn't agree on whose job it was to schedule hearings. Many of those cases were eventually dismissed.

More than 2,000 indictments have been pending statewide for more than three years. Experts recommend that all felony cases be disposed of in a year or less, a standard required in some states.

More than one-third of the 434 felony cases that Johnson County district judges sent to the grand jury between 1997 and 2001 never got there. By the beginning of this year, prosecutors still had not presented them to the grand jury.

There is wide disparity in the length of time to resolve felony cases in Kentucky. In the past seven years, it took an average of 30 months in Pike and Franklin counties but less than four months in Carroll, Grant and Muhlenberg counties.

Geoff Gallas of Philadelphia, an authority on court management, said stark differences in how long it takes various counties to dispose of felony indictments should deeply concern those responsible for the state's court system.

"If you accept that [delay] is a justice issue, you don't want one jurisdiction having different justice than another," Gallas said. "You can't accept that disparity.

When the newspaper reported nearly a year ago that Bullitt County had hundreds of lost and mishandled felony cases, Kentucky Chief Justice Joseph Lambert called that situation an anomaly. He repeated that in a recent interview, in which he declined to say whether he was aware of similar problems in other counties.

"My sense is that we do a very good job in this state in all aspects of the operation of the state judiciary," he said.

Rose Parker Payton said her father, William Parker, was angry that the case disappeared, just like the hit-and-run driver who put him in a wheelchair . He died five years later, and four years after that, the charges died for lack of prosecution. (By Michael Clevenger, The C-J) There are several relatively easy ways to fix or at least improve Kentucky's inconsistent criminal-justice system.

Many other states have rules that guarantee speedy trials or time limits for prosecutors and judges to try cases, and with good results. But some Kentucky officials, including Lambert, are reluctant to embrace those ideas.

"We didn't invent Kentucky law, and we didn't invent Kentucky criminal procedure, when I became chief justice [five years ago]," Lambert said. "Just because a practice became a practice in 1930 doesn't mean that it was a bad practice.

"If a rule needs to be changed, then I'm prepared to support a rule change. But unless there's a good reason to do it, we just generally don't do that sort of thing."

NINE-YEAR DELAY Hit-and-run victim never got justice Delay unquestionably was important to William "Mutt" Parker, who died while waiting for justice.

On Aug. 7, 1988, a hit-and-run driver struck Parker down on a Frankfort street. One of Parker's legs was badly broken; he would have to use a wheelchair for the rest of his life.

The following April, 18-year-old Arnetta L. Brown was indicted by a Franklin County grand jury on charges of hitting Parker and leaving the scene.

For reasons that prosecutors cannot explain, Brown's case languished in court for more than nine years before it finally was dismissed for lack of prosecution in December 1998 — nearly four years after Parker had died at the age of 67.

"I know my dad was angry that nothing was done," said Rose Parker Payton, Parker's daughter. "...He felt like everyone in the court system had let him down."

The case against Brown was one of more than 600 felony indictments dismissed in Franklin County in the last eight years for lack of prosecution. Former Commonwealth's Attorney Morris Burton acknowledged that he spent most of his 16-year tenure dealing with major cases and that many others were overlooked or ignored.

And Franklin County is not the only place with a big backlog of criminal cases. For both victims and defendants in Kentucky, the county where a crime is committed can determine whether justice will be dispensed swiftly, slowly or not at all.

American Bar Association standards recommend that 98 percent of all felony cases be resolved within six months.

But in some Kentucky counties, dozens of criminal cases have been pending for three years or more, according to data provided last month by the state Administrative Office of the Courts.

There were 113 such cases in Pike County, 98 in Letcher County, 87 in Franklin County and 84 in Ohio County, according to the AOC. Although other counties had smaller totals, their old pending cases comprised a larger percentage of all their cases filed during the eight-year period.

Overall in Kentucky during the past seven years, felony cases took an average of 10 months, according to AOC data. In only 12 of the state's 120 counties did the average meet or beat the ABA's six-month standard.

Many Kentucky judges and prosecutors assert that cases lag in their courts because they are overworked and understaffed. That may be so in some counties, but statistics suggest that it is not true for the state as a whole.In 2001, only seven of 37 states with similar court systems had fewer criminal cases filed per 100,000 residents than did Kentucky, according to statistics compiled by the National Center for State Courts. And only nine of the 37 had fewer cases filed per judge.

Only two states with similar court systems closed a lower percentage of criminal cases from 1999 through 2001 than Kentucky did, according to the national center.

Moreover, Kentucky's crime rate is relatively low, according to FBI statistics — further evidence that the state's courts are not being inundated with criminal cases. In 2001, 40 states had higher rates of violent and property crimes per 100,000 population.

Ah, but one can be assured that the local private shysters are all very wealthy. The American legal industry is almost completely evil, an enemy to the people.

2 posted on 10/12/2003 6:44:27 AM PDT by friendly (Man is so made that whenever anything fires his soul, impossibilities vanish.)

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Interesting and disturbing. Thanks for the post.

Yet another example of the "mess in Frankfort" that needs to be cleaned up by electing Ernie Fletcher as our first Republican Governor in many years.

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