Kentucky Law Survey: Evidence

This article is a survey of Kentucky law on evidence. Almost as often as not the government\u27s case in criminal litigation will contain evidence indicating that the accused committed some offense other than the one for which he is being tried. Consequently a set of rules to control the use of evidence of other crimes has evolved. In most jurisdictions it consists of a single rule that prohibits the use of such evidence against a defendant along with a group of exceptions that virtually engulfs the prohibition against admissibility. Kentucky law is so structured. As all lawyers who engage in criminal litigation in this state know, evidence of other crimes may be introduced by the government to prove motive, intent, knowledge, identity, absence of mistake or accident, common scheme, and so on and so forth. Since the last survey of evidence law, the Kentucky Supreme Court has decided two cases of significance to this doctrine