A study on whether Kentucky accurately and fairly administers capital cases is upcoming. However, southcentral Kentucky lawmakers say they don’t believe a death penalty moratorium is necessary while the work is under way.

The American Bar Association announced this week that it will make Kentucky the ninth state in which such a study will be done. Calls were raised for Gov. Steve Beshear to halt executions until that ABA team has made its assessment.

“I favor the death penalty in limited use in specific instances of violent or heinous murder, and I do believe that with advanced DNA identification and other safeguards that the death penalty is administered fairly,” said Rep. Jody Richards, D-Bowling Green. “I would not be in favor of a moratorium on the death penalty.”

The issue of a moratorium was raised after Attorney General and U.S. Senate candidate Jack Conway’s call Monday for Beshear to set execution dates for three convicted murderers on Kentucky’s death row — potentially leading to the doubling of the number of citizens the state has executed since the death penalty was re-established in 1976.

The inmates – Ralph Baze, Gregory Lee Wilson and Robert Carl Foley – had pending legal challenges in the Kentucky Supreme Court, claiming that the Kentucky Department of Corrections did not follow state-mandated administrative procedures before adopting the current three-drug protocol for lethal injection, and should have held public hearings on it. The court ruled Wednesday that the state must re-adopt its legal injection method.

“I do not support the death penalty and I am pro-life, but I feel like the administration of the death penalty in Kentucky is done correctly,” said Rep. C.B. Embry, R-Morgantown.

“If a person has a trial and is found guilty by a jury of their peers, I don’t think race or anything enters into it. What a judge or jury says is based on the evidence.” Embry said.

Rep. Wilson Stone, D-Scottsville, said: “Whatever the law is now in Kentucky is what we should follow. We should do so until it has been changed, so I would not support a moratorium at this time.”

Sen. Mike Reynolds, D-Bowling Green, was less committal and would like to see a bill proposing any action on changing the system before making a decision to support a capital punishment moratorium.

“As an attorney I do not want to interfere with the court system on cases that I am not involved in, or as a legislator (I do not) want to interfere,” said Reynolds, an attorney at Reynolds, Johnston, Hinton & Pepper in Bowling Green.

Others across the state have been more vocal. A group of 14 prominent Kentucky lawyers on Monday asked for a moratorium on executions pending the ABA review, including Kennedy Helm III, the managing partner of Beshear’s former law firm, Stites and Harbison.

The ABA’s 10-member review panel of Kentucky law professors, a prosecutor, several lawyers and former state Supreme Court justices is expected to take 12 to 18 months to complete its work, according to Nancy Slonim, ABA director of policy communications in the division for media relations and communication services in Chicago.

“The Kentucky team was created as of last week, and it has hardly begun its work,” she said. “It has not arrived at any conclusions or made any judgments. The two primary reasons for selecting Kentucky for an assessment are that it is the only state thus far in which there is a racial justice act, and it has a statewide defender system.”

In 1998, Kentucky became the first state to pass a racial justice act that outlaws the use of race as a deciding factor in capital cases.

The ABA first called on the country’s courts in 1997 to refrain from imposing death sentences until the fairness of capital punishment could be studied and adequate protections against executing innocent people could be instituted. In order to study the issue, the ABA developed protocols to assist states in making that analysis.

“The ABA has not taken a position for or against the death penalty as an appropriate sanction for crime,” Slonim said. “Rather, it has said that if the government is going to take a life, first it must ensure justice.”

Over the past 30 years, the ABA has become increasingly concerned that capital jurisdictions too often provide neither fairness nor accuracy in the administration of the death penalty. In response to that concern, the ABA in February 1997 called for a nationwide moratorium on executions until what it called “serious flaws in the system” are identified and eliminated.

Studies similar to the one being conducted in Kentucky have been done in eight other states: Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Tennessee. The ABA found numerous and significant compliance problems in all of the states it has examined.

Those compliance areas include: the preservation and testing of DNA and other types of evidence, crime lab and medical examiner offices, prosecutorial professionalism, defense services, state post-conviction proceedings, clemency, capital jury instruction, judicial independence, the treatment of racial and ethnic minorities, mental retardation and mental illness.

The Kentucky study will focus on those areas of death penalty administration under ABA protocols, Slonim said.

Others across the state, meanwhile, called for Beshear to take action.

The Rev. Pat Delahanty, chair of the Kentucky Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, asked Beshear not to sign any death warrants pending the assessment’s outcome.

“We are asking the governor to hold off on signing any death warrants pending a complete assessment of the way the death penalty is administered in Kentucky,” Delahanty said. “Three executions will shock the conscience of a state that has executed only four people since 1956.”

With all of the legal and policy questions about the death penalty being raised, including questions about the legality of lethal injection in Kentucky, now is not the time to resume executions, much less multiple executions, said Donald Vish, director of education and advocacy for KCADP.

Of the 50 capital cases reviewed by the Kentucky Supreme Court and the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, 42 have been reversed, according to the Kentucky Department of Public Advocacy. Public Advocate Ed Monahan and Louisville Metro Chief Public Defender Dan Goyette have also joined in the call for a moratorium on executions pending the ABA review.

“The error rate in Kentucky capital cases over the last 33 years is stunning and unacceptably high,” Monahan said. “It is compelling evidence that indicates the system is broken. This excessive rate of error shows that the system cannot get it right. A moratorium will prevent the execution of an individual whose conviction and death sentence has been imposed by an unfair and arbitrary system.”

Goyette said: “There are serious and disturbing questions about the convictions of a number of inmates facing execution, particularly in those cases that were tried years ago by unqualified lawyers lacking adequate resources. We should not proceed with executions until this independent evaluation is completed and we are assured that due process has been fully and properly provided in each and every case.”

Death row holds a number of inmates who are severely mentally ill, who had ineffective lawyers and who had trials with serious errors that remain uncorrected, according to Goyette and Monahan.

The Department of Public Advocacy is Kentucky’s statewide public defender program providing full-time representation to indigent defendants in all 120 counties in more than 147,000 cases a year.