page_title: Kentucky
section_title: Law
hierarchical_section_title: Kentucky / Law and government / Law
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Kentucky, Grenzschild an der Interstate 65
context_page_description: Kentucky, officially the Commonwealth of Kentucky, is a U.S. state located in the Southern region of the country. It was admitted into the Union as the 15th state on June 1, 1792, splitting from Virginia in the process. Kentucky is the 37th most extensive and the 26th most populous of the 50 United States.
  The bluegrass region in the central part of the state contains the state's capital, Frankfort, as well as its two largest cities, Louisville and Lexington, the two of which together are home to over 20% of the state's population. Kentucky shares borders with Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio to the north, West Virginia and Virginia to the east, Tennessee to the south, and Missouri to the west.
  Kentucky is known as the "Bluegrass State", a nickname based on Kentucky bluegrass, a species of grass found in many of its pastures. It is home to the world's longest cave system: Mammoth Cave National Park, as well as one of the greatest lengths of navigable waterways and streams in the contiguous United States and the two largest man-made lakes east of the Mississippi River.
context_section_description: Kentucky's body of laws, known as the Kentucky Revised Statutes (KRS), were enacted in 1942 to better organize and clarify the whole of Kentucky law. The statutes are enforced by local police, sheriffs and deputy sheriffs, and constables and deputy constables. Unless they have completed a police academy elsewhere, these officers are required to complete Police Officer Professional Standards (POPS) training at the Kentucky Department of Criminal Justice Training Center on the campus of Eastern Kentucky University in Richmond. Additionally, in 1948, the Kentucky General Assembly established the Kentucky State Police, making it the 38th state to create a force whose jurisdiction extends throughout the given state.
  Kentucky is one of the 32 states in the United States that sanctions the death penalty for certain murders defined as heinous. Those convicted of capital crimes after March 31, 1998 are always executed by lethal injection; those convicted on or before this date may opt for the electric chair. Only three people have been executed in Kentucky since the U.S. Supreme Court re-instituted the practice in 1976. The most notable execution in Kentucky was that of Rainey Bethea on August 14, 1936. Bethea was publicly hanged in Owensboro for the rape and murder of Lischia Edwards. Irregularities with the execution led to this becoming the last public execution in the United States.
  Kentucky has been on the front lines of the debate over displaying the Ten Commandments on public property. In the 2005 case of McCreary County v. ACLU of Kentucky, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the decision of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals that a display of the Ten Commandments in the Whitley City courthouse of McCreary County was unconstitutional. Later that year, Judge Richard Fred Suhrheinrich, writing for the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in the case of ACLU of Kentucky v. Mercer County, wrote that a display including the Mayflower Compact, the Declaration of Independence, the Ten Commandments, the Magna Carta, The Star-Spangled Banner, and the national motto could be erected in the Mercer County courthouse.
  Kentucky has also been known to have unusually high political candidacy age laws, especially compared to surrounding states. The origin of this is unknown, but it has been suggested it has to do with the commonwealth tradition.
  A 2008 study found that Kentucky's Supreme Court to be the least influential high court in the nation with its decisions rarely being followed by other states.
caption: State sign, Interstate 65
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