EKB News

Until recent years, Kentucky, along with other states, lacked strict rules about the handling and storing of evidence after trials, leading to missing, lost or destroyed material. The Innocence Project, a New York-based national organization that seeks to free those wrongly convicted, says group efforts at reinvestigating old cases were hampered by lost evidence. But, Boone County Commonwealth's Attorney Linda Tally Smith says lost evidence isn't the problem it appears to be, since other evidence points to guilt for the person in prison. Kentucky Innocence Project Director Ted Shouse says evidence issues have emerged in at least six capital cases in Kentucky, along with potentially hundreds of other prosecutions, including rapes and robberies. In the last decade, most states' evidence preservation laws have been enacted or amended. The laws generally fall into three areas :

A requirement that all evidence be preserved from collection until the end of all appeals, used by states including Kentucky and Texas.

A requirement that evidence be preserved once a petition to test it has been filed.

And laws allowing post-conviction DNA testing.