The Associated Press

LOUISVILLE - Kentucky defendants and their alleged victims sometimes wait years or even decades for their cases to be heard, according to an eight-month investigation by the Courier-Journal.

How quickly cases move through the criminal justice system depends greatly on the county where the crime is committed, according to the newspaper, which published its findings Sunday.

The newspaper said differences among judges and prosecutors and an absence of state oversight appear to account for the delays and the disparities between the swiftness of justice in some counties and the lack of it in others.

Thousands of felony cases have been allowed to stall, disappear or be dismissed for lack of prosecution, the investigation found.

More than 2,000 indictments have been pending statewide for more than three years. Experts recommend that all felony cases be disposed of in a year or less, a standard required in some states.

The newspaper found that some criminal cases took up to two decades to complete.

"Many states have speedy-trial laws," said Bill Fortune, a University of Kentucky law professor. "We should have one here. Otherwise you've got these situations ... where cases just sit there forever, and it's not fair to the defendant; it's not fair to the victim; it's not fair to anybody."

More than 600 cases have been dismissed since 1995 in Franklin County after lying dormant for years.

Johnson County district judges sent more than 400 cases to the grand jury between 1997 and 2001, but by the beginning of this year prosecutors had not presented more than a third of those.

Kentucky has no clear rules delineating who is responsible for moving criminal cases. Hundreds of felony indictments piled up in Pike County after judges and the commonwealth's attorney couldn't agree on whose job it was to schedule hearings. Many of those cases were eventually dismissed.

The newspaper found a wide disparity in the length of time to resolve felony cases. In the past seven years, it took an average of 30 months in Pike and Franklin counties. But in the judicial circuit that includes Carroll, Grant and Owen counties, felonies are usually disposed of within four months or less.

The newspaper reported last year on a backlog of court cases in one jurisdiction, Bullitt County, where it found hundreds of lingering cases.

At that time, Kentucky Chief Justice Joseph Lambert called the Bullitt County situation an anomaly. After the newspaper's disclosures, Lambert dispatched a second judge to Bullitt County to help address the problem.

Lambert also was interviewed for the paper's latest investigation.

"My sense is that we do a very good job in this state in all aspects of the operation of the state judiciary," he said.

American Bar Association standards recommend that 98 percent of all felony cases be resolved within six months. Many other states have rules that guarantee speedy trials or time limits for prosecutors and judges to try cases, and with good results.

But in some Kentucky counties, dozens of criminal cases have been pending for three years or more, according to data provided last month by the state Administrative Office of the Courts. There were 113 such cases in Pike County.

Overall in Kentucky during the past seven years, felony cases took an average of 10 months, according to AOC data. In only 12 of the state's 120 counties did the average meet or beat the six-month standard.

Many Kentucky judges and prosecutors assert that cases lag in their courts because they are overworked and understaffed. But in 2001, only seven of 37 states with similar court systems had fewer criminal cases filed per 100,000 residents than did Kentucky, according to statistics compiled by the National Center for State Courts. And only nine of the 37 had fewer cases filed per judge.

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