By Austin Horn
Lexington Herald-Leader
LEXINGTON, Ky. — Kentucky has not executed a person in more than 15 years.
Attorney General Russell Coleman wants to change that, potentially opening the door for Kentucky’s 20-plus people on death row to be executed.
Coleman, a Republican, filed a motion Thursday in Franklin Circuit Court to render moot that court’s injunction on executions in the state, which has been in place since 2010.
In a news release announcing his motion, Coleman said that the families of victims deserve “justice” via these executions.
“For almost 15 years, Kentucky has been bogged down by delays as violent criminals tie up our legal system with costly litigation as they seek to avoid justice,” Coleman wrote in a news release. “The survivors of the victims of these horrific crimes have suffered in limbo for long enough.
“They deserve the justice that was lawfully delivered by a jury.”
In 2010, Franklin Circuit Court Judge Phillip Shepherd initially ruled that executions should be prohibited for a range of reasons.
In 2019, some of those issues were deemed to have been resolved except one: the lack of an automatic suspension of execution provision for inmates deemed to be intellectually disabled.
Coleman, in a motion filed in the case of Ralph Baze, argued that a new change to state regulations around executions resolves this issue. Baze killed the Powell County sheriff and one sheriff’s deputy in 1992, and was sentenced to death in 1994.
A regulation promulgated by the Beshear administration this week directs the commissioner of the Department of Corrections to suspend an execution if informed that the inmate has “an intellectual disability or an IQ test score of seventy-five (75) or less.”
That satisfies the previously identified issue of not having an automatic suspension of execution for someone deemed intellectually disabled, Coleman argued.
In a release touting Coleman’s motion, the attorney general referenced the case of Benny Lee Hodge, a death row inmate who murdered Tammy Acker in Letcher County in 1986. Tawny Acker, the sister of Tammy, supports Coleman seeking an execution.
“My family and the families of other Kentuckians will not be safe if he (Hodge) should ever be released,” Acker said. “I’m thankful Attorney General Coleman and his team are continuing the fight for justice so that no other family ever has to go through this pain well after a jury reaches its verdict.”
According to a January report from Louisville Public Media, inmates spend the longest on death row of any state in the country.
One man, Karu Gene White, killed three people in Breathitt County in 1979; he’s been on death row 44 years since being sentenced to death by execution.
Coleman is also advocating for White’s execution, filing a 76-page brief in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit this week, according to his office.
Marco Allen Chapman was the last person executed by the state. He was executed via lethal injection in 2008 after he murdered two children and raped their mother.
In 2022, the GOP-dominated Kentucky state legislature banned the death penalty for those with certain mental disorders. The bill received bipartisan support.
This year, two bills have been introduced in the House and Senate by Republican legislators to completely abolish the death penalty, replacing it with life imprisonment without parole for inmates presently sentenced to death. The bills would also prohibit life imprisonment without parole for juveniles.
Neither of those bills, sponsored by GOP Rep. James Tipton, and GOP Sen. Stephen Meredith, have received committee hearings more than two-thirds of the way into the legislative session.
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