Kentucky

From voting rights to wages to housing assistance, these officials advocate for systemic change to reduce incarceration.

The overall crime rate is nearly as low as it’s been in decades, but that hasn’t stopped officials from pushing draconian measures likely only to fuel mass incarceration and harm public safety. It’s time for a different approach.

At Kentucky’s Northpoint Training Center, incarcerated people are not allowed to participate in programs until they’re at least four years away from their parole board date—robbing people of years of educational opportunities.

The political paradigm emerging in Louisville is being formed by newcomers to local politics.

The Courier Journal’s Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting on Governor Matt Bevin’s commutations sensationalizes crime at the expense of future clemency efforts.

Louisville, Kentucky judges are ordering people with COVID-19 who have allegedly defied quarantine to wear GPS ankle monitors, raising ethical questions about the government’s role in a pandemic.

A case before the Kentucky Supreme Court involves a challenge to the practice of charging people for the time they are held in jail even if they are ultimately not convicted of the charges against them.

The bill would disproportionately affect the 140,000 people whose voting rights were recently restored.

A claimed victory in Kentucky and wins in Virginia mean hundreds of thousands of people could have their right to vote restored.

A federal lawsuit claims that Asheville, North Carolina’s interim chief, Robert C. White, prevented a rape victim from filing a complaint against an officer when he led the Louisville, Kentucky, department.

The region of eastern Kentucky, once reliant on mining and the coal industry, has, over the decades, become home to three federal prisons. Last year, the Daily Appeal wrote about the controversial proposal to build yet another federal prison in Letcher County, Kentucky. That project had been pushed since 2005 by local backers and a powerful U.S. representative, […]

The Boyd County Detention Center has been consumed in chaos, even as the DOJ investigates it. Now, the community is pinning hopes for reform on a new jailer.

M. thought she was doing the right thing. She had become dependent on opioids, but when she learned she was pregnant, she immediately tried to enroll in a medication assisted treatment (MAT) program. MAT is the standard of care for treating people with opioid use disorder — especially pregnant women, as quitting opioids too suddenly […]

In 2013, Kentucky closed the last of its private prisons partly because of a 2011 State House Bill that moved low-level drug offenders into treatment instead of prison, through a deferred prosecution program. Fueled by the bill’s success, Kentucky’s prison population went down to 20,300 by the end of 2013, down from 21,466 in 2012. The 5.3% […]

The murder convictions of two Kentucky men have been thrown out after new evidence was discovered in their cases. Garr Keith Hardin and Jeffrey DeWayne Clark will get new trials after a judge found there was no credible evidence that the killing of Rhonda Sue Warford was related to satanic worship. The Kentucky Supreme Court upheld the ruling. The […]

The Christian County Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office has been removed from handling a murder case after a judge found that Commonwealth’s Attorney Lynn Pryor had a conflict of interest from previously dating the lead detective. Pryor, who took over as top county prosecutor in January 2007, and her entire office are now off the murder case of Jarred Tabor Long […]

A Kentucky judge has ruled that the death penalty is unconstitutional for defendants who committed a murder before they turned 21 years of old. In 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Roper v. Simmons that the death penalty is unconstitutional for anyone who committed murder when they were under the age of 18. Fayette Circuit Court […]

A Kentucky murder conviction has unraveled amid allegations that the elected prosecutor was having an affair with the lead detective on the case. The prosecutor’s office is also being accused of failing to disclose critical evidence to the defense. David Wayne Dooley was convicted of the 2012 murder of Michelle Mockbee and sentenced to life in […]

The Kentucky Supreme Court unanimously threw out a child molestation conviction because the Campbell County trial prosecutor “flagrantly abused its authority in prosecuting the case” by making misleading statements to the jury during closing argument. David Albert Soloway was sentenced to 45 years in prison after the 8-year-old daughter of his live-in girlfriend accused him of molesting […]