EKB News

The death penalty was reinstated nationwide in 1976, and Kentucky has since then sentenced 92 defendants to death. Critics of the capital punishment system in the state say the state can't afford to continue to impose death penalties that drag on indefinitely but rarely end in execution. The state Department of Public Advocacy estimates Kentucky spends as much as $8 million per year incarcerating, defending and prosecuting death-row inmates,while more than one-third of the state's current death-row inmates have been there at least two decades. Thirty other inmates on death-row, over the past 33 years, have had their sentences reduced as the result of appeals. Opponents say long delays and reversals are the result of a broken system that was vastly unfunded. In 2007, some states banned executions, but Kentucky politicians show no inclination to abolish capital punishment, regardless of the cost.