RENDERED: JANUARY 20, 2022

TO BE PUBLISHED

Supreme Court of Kentucky

2020-SC-0550-MR

MICHAEL J. LEWIS APPELLANT

ON APPEAL FROM KENTON CIRCUIT COURT

V. HONORABLE KATHLEEN LAPE, JUDGE 

NO. 18-CR-01084

COMMONWEALTH OF KENTUCKY APPELLEE

OPINION OF THE COURT BY CHIEF JUSTICE MINTON

AFFIRMING

A circuit court jury convicted Michael J. Lewis of three counts of firstdegree, second-offense, trafficking in a controlled substance and recommended 

a sentence of 32 years in prison. The trial court adopted the recommended 

sentence and entered judgment accordingly. 

Lewis appeals from the judgment as a matter of right,1 alleging two trial 

court errors. First, Lewis argues that the trial court committed reversible error 

when, as jury selection began, it inadvertently read the “second offense” portion 

of his indictment to the assembled venire. Second, Lewis alleges that the trial 

court committed reversible error when it allowed the prosecution to introduce

into evidence photos of Lewis taken at the jail after his arrest. We find that the 

 

1 Ky. Const. § 110(2)(b).
2

trial court did not reversibly err in either instance, and thus we affirm the trial 

court’s judgment.

I. FACTS AND PROCEDURAL HISTORY

While acting as a police informant, Anthony Sweigart met Michael Lewis 

through a mutual friend. Sweigart and his friend visited Lewis at his 

residence, and Lewis offered to sell heroin to the two. The police then 

organized a controlled buy of heroin from Lewis. Wearing a body camera that 

captured each encounter, Sweigart made three separate controlled buys from 

Lewis.

As trial commenced on the charges arising out of these encounters, the 

trial court read aloud to the venire the text of Lewis’s indictment. However, the 

trial court failed to omit the words second offense and having previously been 

convicted of first-degree trafficking in a controlled substance from her reading of 

the indictment. Lewis objected immediately, requesting a mistrial, claiming the 

jury was impermissibly informed of his status as a prior offender. The trial 

court denied the request for a mistrial and instead admonished the jury to 

disregard what had been previously read to them and re-read the indictment 

omitting any reference to the prior conviction.

The Commonwealth introduced into evidence a series of photos of Lewis 

taken at the jail after his arrest. The Commonwealth introduced the images as 

evidence to establish Lewis as the individual selling heroin to Sweigart in the 

body-camera footage. Specifically, the photos showed Lewis’s distinctive 

tattoos that were visible in the body-camera footage. The jury was not 
3

informed that the photographs were taken after Lewis had been placed under 

arrest, and the images were doctored to remove indications that the images 

were taken while Lewis was in custody. For example, portions of the images 

showing Lewis’s jail garb were cropped out.

Lewis objected to the introduction of these images into evidence, claiming 

that the jury would recognize the photos as having been taken while he was in

custody. Lewis argued that the jury would assume that the photos were taken 

during his incarceration for a previous offense and thus were prejudicial to his 

case. The trial court allowed the photographs to be entered into evidence, 

overruling Lewis’s objection.

Upon conclusion of Lewis’s case-in-chief, the jury found him guilty of 

three counts of trafficking in a controlled substance. In the sentencing phase, 

the jury was informed of his status as a previous offender. The jury then 

recommended a sentence of 32 years in prison, which the trial court adopted.

II. ANALYSIS

A. The trial court did not err in denying Lewis’s request for a mistrial.

Lewis contends that the trial court committed reversible error in failing to 

grant him a mistrial after the venire was read his entire indictment, including

the mention of his previous offenses. The trial court read: 

Commonwealth of Kentucky versus Michael Jamal Lewis and this case 

number is 18-CR-1084. That on or about August 6, in Kenton County, 

Kentucky, the defendant committed the offense of first-degree trafficking 

in a controlled substance, second offense, a felony, when the defendant 

knowingly and unlawfully possessed a quantity of heroin, a schedule I 

narcotic, with intent to sell or distribute some amount of said heroin; 

and/or did, in fact, manufacture, distribute, dispense, or sell a quantity 
4

of heroin, a schedule I narcotic, in violation of KRS 218A.1412, having 

previously been convicted of first-degree trafficking in a controlled 

substance.

Lewis objected to the inclusion of references to his prior convictions (the bolded 

portions above). Following a bench conference and a brief break during which 

the parties each researched the issue, Lewis requested a mistrial on the 

grounds that the jury had been informed of his previous convictions and would 

be prejudiced against him as a result. The trial court denied his request, 

instead finding that an admonition to the jury would cure any potential error 

that occurred. Lewis now appeals his conviction on, in part, the grounds that 

the court committed reversible error in refusing to grant a mistrial.

Declaring a mistrial is “an extreme remedy and should be resorted to 

only when there appears in the record a manifest necessity for such an action 

or an urgent or real necessity.”2 We review a trial court’s decision to deny a 

mistrial under an abuse-of-discretion standard.3 Therefore, we will disturb the 

trial court’s decision only if we find it unreasonable, unfair, arbitrary, or 

unsupported by sound legal principles.4

Before adoption of the Kentucky Rules of Criminal Procedure in 1963, 

Section 219 of the Criminal Code of Practice required either the clerk of the 

court or the Commonwealth’s Attorney to read the indictment to the jury at 

 

2 Bray v. Commonwealth, 68 S.W.3d 375, 383 (Ky. 2002).

3 Slone v. Commonwealth, 382 S.W.3d 851, 858 (Ky. 2012). 

4 Bounds v. Commonwealth, 630 S.W.3d 651, 659 (Ky. 2021) (quoting 

Commonwealth v. English, 993 S.W.2d 941, 945 (Ky. 1999)).
5

some point before the conclusion of the Commonwealth’s evidence.5 The 

failure to comply with this rule was grounds for reversal of the defendant’s 

conviction.6 Kentucky has since adopted the Rules of Criminal Procedure, and 

RCr7 9.42 replaced Section 219. RCr 9.42 makes reading the indictment to the 

jury an optional responsibility of the Commonwealth’s Attorney. However, the 

trial court’s practice of reading the defendant’s indictment to the jury is one 

that lingers in some circuit courts across the Commonwealth. In this case, 

such tradition drove the actions of the trial court in reading Lewis’s indictment 

to the jury.

By including the portions of Lewis’s indictment that mentioned his 

previous convictions, the trial court committed error. Under KRE8 404(b), 

evidence of other crimes or bad acts committed by the defendant is

inadmissible for the purpose of proving the defendant’s character “in order to 

show action in conformity therewith.” KRS 404(b)(1) includes several other 

purposes for which character evidence might be admissible, including “proof of 

motive, opportunity, intent, preparation, plan, knowledge, identity, or absence 

of mistake or accident . . . .” Because the trial court could not offer the 

information contained in the indictment for any of these permissible purposes, 

the evidence of Lewis’s previous convictions was admitted in error.

 

5 Calhoun v. Commonwealth, 378 S.W.2d 222, 223 (Ky. 1964).

6 Id. (citing Farris v. Commonwealth, 63 S.W. 615, 617 (Ky. 1901)).

7 Kentucky Rules of Criminal Procedure.

8 Kentucky Rules of Evidence.
6

Breaches of KRE 404(b)’s rule against the admission of prior bad acts as 

character evidence are generally subject to admonitory cures.9 Such an 

admonition to the jury is deemed to cure an error unless “the argument was so 

prejudicial, under the circumstances of the case, that an admonition could not 

cure it.”10 As such, upon Lewis’s objection and the trial court’s recognition 

that portions of the indictment were read in error, it was within the trial court’s 

discretion to determine whether the jury should be admonished or whether the 

error was so prejudicial that a mistrial was required.

Lewis likens his case to Clay v. Commonwealth, in which a trial court 

failed to bifurcate a defendant’s trial for trafficking cocaine and the subsequent 

offense of being a persistent felony offender.11 We found that, in that case, the 

defendant’s case was fatally prejudiced by the mention of his previous offense 

during the trial and the testimony of two parole officers at the trial about the 

defendant’s previous felony conviction.12 We held that, instead, his trial should 

have been bifurcated and the previous convictions should not have been 

mentioned until the sentencing portion of the trial.13

We find Lewis’s case distinguishable from Clay. Lewis’s trial was 

bifurcated into a guilt phase and a sentencing phase. Outside of the trial 

 

9 Boyd v. Commonwealth, 439 S.W.3d 126, 132 (Ky. 2014); see also Jacobsen v. 

Commonwealth, 376 S.W.3d 600, 611 (Ky. 2012).

10 Price v. Commonwealth, 59 S.W.3d 878, 881 (Ky. 2001). 

11 Clay v. Commonwealth, 818 S.W.2d 264, 265 (Ky. 1991), abrogated on other 

grounds by Bratcher v. Commonwealth, 424 S.W.3d 411 (Ky. 2014).

12 Id. at 266.

13 Id. 
7

court’s error in reading Lewis’s indictment in its entirety, no evidence or 

testimony was admitted during the guilt phase regarding Lewis’s previous 

convictions. Although Clay mentions the erroneous reading of an indictment as 

a factor in determining whether a mistrial is required in such a case, this factor 

alone is not dispositive. We find that the brief mention of Lewis’s previous 

conviction and the admonition that followed did not seriously prejudice Lewis’s 

case such that a mistrial was required.

Lewis similarly tries to analogize his case to Commonwealth v. Ramsey, 

in which this Court held that KRS 189A.010(4) is a sentencing statute that 

enhances the penalty for repeat DUI offenders rather than a creation of a new 

statutory offense (“driving under the influence, fourth offense”).14 As such, we 

held that a charge under that statute required a bifurcated trial: a guilt phase 

to prove the DUI in the present indictment and a sentencing phase to prove the 

previous offenses.15 We determined that the trial court was correct in granting 

the defendant’s motion in limine to exclude evidence of the prior convictions 

from the guilt phase of the trial, so we remanded the case to the trial court to 

proceed with the bifurcated trial.16

In the present case, however, Lewis does not allege that the trial court 

failed to bifurcate the trial, nor did the Commonwealth attempt to introduce 

evidence of Lewis’s prior convictions. The error made by the trial court in 

 

14 Commonwealth v. Ramsey, 920 S.W.2d 526, 528 (Ky. 1996).

15 Id. at 528–29.

16 Id.
8

reading Lewis’s full indictment to the jury during the guilt phase did not have 

the prejudicial effect we sought to avoid in Ramsey because the jury in the 

present case was admonished to disregard the information, and we presume 

the admonition to be curative. We do not find that this Court’s decision in 

Ramsey compels us to deem the error committed in Lewis’s case to be gravely 

prejudicial, requiring a mistrial.

Overall, Lewis fails to state how his case was prejudiced in such a way 

that necessitates a mistrial rather than an admonition. Instead, Lewis makes 

hay of the fact that this error occurred at an early stage in the proceedings, 

before voir dire had been conducted and the jury sworn in. He argues that it is 

the responsibility of the trial court to err on the side of caution and empanel a 

new jury when an error occurs so early in the proceedings. We find Lewis’s 

focus on judicial economy to be immaterial to our analysis. Instead, we 

consider only the extent of potential prejudice to the defendant resulting from 

the error. 

Because we find no manifest injustice in the trial court’s decision to deny 

Lewis’s request for a mistrial, we find that the trial court did not err in 

correcting the error by providing the jury with an admonition to disregard the 

reading of the indictment.17 We presume that the jury followed such 

admonition, curing any error that occurred.18

 

17 Lewis failed to raise an objection to the language of the admonition itself, so 

we decline to analyze its efficacy here and instead accept its curative presumption.

18 Johnson v. Commonwealth, 105 S.W.3d 430, 441 (Ky. 2003).
9

B. The trial court did not err in allowing post-arrest photos of Lewis to 

be admitted into evidence.

During pre-trial discovery, the Commonwealth provided Lewis with

several photographs it intended to introduce into evidence. The photographs 

were images of Lewis’s tattoos that were taken while Lewis was in police 

custody for the charges in the present indictment. The Commonwealth 

intended to introduce the images for the purpose of identification—to prove 

that Lewis was the individual depicted in the body-camera footage selling 

heroin to Sweigart. Lewis objected to the introduction of the photos on the 

grounds that they violated his Fourteenth Amendment right to due process and 

a fair trial.

We review evidentiary rulings concerning the admission of evidence 

under an abuse-of-discretion standard.19 We will disturb the trial court’s 

decision only if we find it to be “arbitrary, unreasonable, unfair, or 

unsupported by sound legal principles.”20

In order to be admissible, evidence must be relevant, meaning that it has 

a tendency to either prove or disprove an element of the offense at issue.21 The 

determination of relevance is within the discretion of the trial court, and our 

laws of evidence “tilt[] heavily toward admission over exclusion, for there is an 

inclusionary thrust in the law that is powerful and unmistakable.”22 In this 

 

19 Rucker v. Commonwealth, 521 S.W.3d 562, 569 (Ky. 2017). 

20 Commonwealth v. English, 993 S.W.2d 941, 945 (Ky. 1999).

21 KRE 402; Tuttle v. Perry, 82 S.W.3d 920, 922 (Ky. 2002).

22 Tuttle, 82 S.W.3d at 922 (quoting Robert G. Lawson, The Kentucky Evidence 

Law Handbook § 2.05, at 53 (3d ed., Michie Co. 1993)).
10

case, because Lewis pleaded not guilty to the charged offenses, the identity of 

the person depicted in the body camera footage selling heroin was highly 

relevant to the case. In this regard, the trial court did not err in admitting the 

photographs into evidence.

Beyond relevancy, Lewis objects to the admission of the photographs on 

Fourteenth Amendment grounds, claiming that admission of the photographs 

violates his due process right to a fair trial. Lewis contends that the photos 

reveal to the jury that he was in jail because they include slivers of his orange

prisoner’s clothes and display a background of cement block walls. Lewis 

likens the admission of the photographs into evidence to cases in which a

defendant is required to attend his own trial in prison clothes or shackles. In 

such cases, both this Court and the United States Supreme Court have found 

that requiring the defendant to be tried while in prison clothes, over the 

defendant’s objection, is in violation of that defendant’s right to a fair trial.23

In Scrivener v. Commonwealth, this Court found that the trial court 

committed reversible error when it denied a defendant’s request for a 

continuance so that the defendant could be tried in street clothing rather than 

prison clothing. Relying on the United States Supreme Court’s decision in 

Estelle v. Williams, we held that requiring a defendant to be tried in prison 

clothing creates a “possible impairment of the presumption [of innocence] so 

basic to the adversary system” such that it would be “repugnant to the concept 

 

23 Scrivener v. Commonwealth, 539 S.W.2d 291, 292 (Ky. 1976); Estelle v. 

Williams, 425 U.S. 501, 512 (1976).
11

of equal justice embodied in the Fourteenth Amendment.”24 We fail to find 

Lewis’s case so analogous to Scrivener to come to the same result. 

Lewis urges us to apply the test set out by the Kentucky Court of Appeals

in Redd v. Commonwealth to determine the admissibility of the photographs.

25

In that case, the defendant’s mug shots from previous incidents were admitted 

into evidence and identified to the jury as such. The court held that, in order 

for the introduction of the mug shots to be proper, “(1) the prosecution must 

have a demonstrable need to introduce the photographs; (2) the photos 

themselves, if shown to the jury, must not imply that the defendant had a 

criminal record; and (3) the manner of their introduction at trial must be such 

that it does not draw particular attention to the source or implications of the 

photographs.”

26 In applying this test, the court found that the admission of the 

defendant’s mug shots constituted reversible error because the photographs 

and their introduction implied that the defendant had a criminal record and 

drew particular attention to that record.27

The test applied by the court in Redd was adopted from United States v. 

Harrington, a Second Circuit Court of Appeals case in which the court 

examined the permissibility of introducing a mugshot into evidence.28 In this 

case, however, the images at issue are not mug shots, nor are they readily 

 

24 Scrivener, 539 S.W.2d at 292 (quoting Estelle, 425 U.S. at 504).

25 591 S.W.2d 704, 708 (Ky. App. 1979).

26 Id.

27 Id. 

28 490 F.2d 487, 494 (2nd Cir. 1973). 
12

recognizable as having been taken while the defendant was in police custody.

To put it simply, the images bear no “badges of custody.”29 Instead, we find the 

images to be ordinary depictions of the defendant’s physical attributes. As 

such, we consider their admissibility not under the Redd test but simply under 

the KRE 403 balancing test.30

KRE 403 provides an exception to the admission of relevant evidence: 

“[E]vidence may be excluded if its probative value is substantially outweighed 

by the danger of undue prejudice, confusion of the issues, or misleading the 

jury, or by considerations of undue delay, or needless presentation of 

cumulative evidence.” In applying this rule, we must consider whether the 

probative value of the photos of Lewis’s tattoos substantially outweighs the 

danger of undue prejudice caused by the images.

We first consider the prosecution’s purpose in introducing the 

photographs into evidence. Because Lewis contests the trafficking charge 

against him, photographic evidence proving the identity of the person depicted 

in the body-camera footage is highly probative. The Commonwealth did not 

request Lewis to exhibit his tattoos at trial, so this evidence is best introduced 

to the jury through photographic evidence. We find that the photographic 

 

29 Deal v. Commonwealth, 607 S.W.3d 652, 666 (Ky. 2020). 

30 If the photos in this case included “badges of custody,” the appropriate test 

for determining their admissibility would be the test outlined by this Court in Deal v. 

Commonwealth, 607 S.W.3d 652, 663 (Ky. 2020). Although the test in Deal is similar 

to that in Redd, it also incorporates several United States Supreme Court decisions 

and opinions of this Court published after Redd. However, because no “badges of 

custody” existed in the photos in this case, we need not reach that analysis here.
13

evidence establishing the identity of the individual depicted in the body-camera 

footage is highly probative.

Next, we consider whether the photographs of Lewis admitted into 

evidence imply that he has a criminal record such that his case is prejudiced.

The images in question were modified to hide Lewis’s prisoner’s clothing as well 

his location. Although the images still contain slivers of orange prisoner’s 

clothing and a background of cement block walls, we do not find these images 

to communicate that Lewis was in police custody when they were taken. Thus, 

we do not find the images to prejudice Lewis’s case. Additionally, we recognize 

that jurors are aware that the defendant on trial was, at some point, arrested 

and placed in police custody prior to trial. So even if the jurors inferred that 

these images were generated while Lewis was in custody, we do not find that 

this created a necessary implication that Lewis had been charged or convicted 

of crimes prior to those at issue in this case. We find that the probative value 

of the photographs admitted substantially outweighs any possibility of 

prejudice to Lewis and, as such, the trial court did not err by admitting the 

photos into evidence.

III. CONCLUSION

For the reasons stated, we affirm the judgment.

All sitting. All concur. 
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COUNSEL FOR APPELLANT:

Karen Shuff Maurer

Assistant Public Advocate

COUNSEL FOR APPELLEE:

Daniel Cameron

Attorney General of Kentucky

Bryan D. Morrow

Assistant Attorney General

Office of the Solicitor General