Kentucky Supreme Court
and
Court of Appeals
            
Searchable Opinions 
            
            
This site will give you immediate access to opinions, in a PDF format, as they are rendered.  When finality is entered in a case, the final opinion will replace the rendered copy on the site.  Finality and publication status will be shown on the first page of the opinion.


**Note** All documents are in Adobe Acrobat format. You must have Adobe Acrobat Reader to access these documents. It is available for free from http://www.adobe.com
**Comments**  Please send all comments on the performance of this website to webmaster@kycourts.net

West's Compilation of Kentucky Court Rules and Procedures 

Supreme Court Recent Opinions
Click here for the most recent Supreme Court opinions.   The Supreme Court Minutes give you detailed information about the cases released each month and a hyperlink to each opinion, which is in blue and underlined. Opinions designated "To Be Published" also have a summary of the Questions Presented in each case.

Unpublished Opinions

This web site contains both published and unpublished opinions of the Kentucky Supreme Court and Kentucky Court of Appeals. First, opinions that are labeled "NOT TO BE PUBLISHED" shall never be cited or used as authority in any other case in any court of this state. CR 76.28(4)(c). This is true even after the unpublished opinions become final. Secondly, although opinions labeled "TO BE PUBLISHED" may be cited as authority in any court of the Commonwealth of Kentucky, the opinions shall not be cited until all steps in the appellate process have been exhausted and they become final. As of the date Court of Appeals opinions were placed on the web site, none were final.

How to Search
This advanced search engine supports two types of search requests. A natural language search is any sequence of text, like a sentence or a question. After a natural language search, retrieved documents are sorted by their relevance to your search request.

A boolean search request consists of a group of words or phrases linked by connectors such as and and or that indicate the relationship between them. Examples:

apple and pear

Both words must be present

apple or pear

Either word can be present

apple w/5 pear

Apple must occur within 5 words of pear

apple not w/5 pear

Apple must not occur within 5 words of pear

apple and not pear

Only apple must be present

name contains smith

The field name must contain smith

If you use more than one connector, you should use parentheses to indicate precisely what you want to search for. For example, apple and pear or orange juice could mean (apple and pear) or orange, or it could mean apple and (pear or orange).

Noise words, such as if and the, are ignored in searches.

Search terms may include the following special characters:

?

Matches any single character. Example: appl? matches apply or apple.

*

Matches any number of characters. Example: appl* matches application

~

Stemming. Example: apply~ matches apply, applies, applied.

%

Fuzzy search. Example: ba%nana matches banana, bananna.

#

Phonic search. Example: #smith matches smith, smythe.

&

Synonym search. Example: fast& matches quick.

~~

Numeric range. Example: 12~~24 matches 18.

:

Variable term weighting. Example: apple:4 w/5 pear:1

Words and Phrases

You do not need to use any special punctuation or commands to search for a phrase. Simply enter the phrase the way it ordinarily appears. You can use a phrase anywhere in a search request. Example:

apple w/5 fruit salad

If a phrase contains a noise word, the search tool will skip over the noise word when searching for it. For example, a search for statue of liberty would retrieve any document containing the word statue, any intervening word, and the word liberty.

Punctuation inside of a search word is treated as a space. Thus, can't would be treated as a phrase consisting of two words: can and t. 1843(c)(8)(ii) would become 1843 c 8 ii (four words).

Wildcards (* and ?)

A search word can contain the wildcard characters * and ?. A ? in a word matches any single character, and a * matches any number of characters. The wildcard characters can be in any position in a word. For example:

appl* would match apple, application, etc.

*cipl* would match principle, participle, etc.

appl? would match apply and apple but not apples.

ap*ed would match applied, approved, etc.

Use of the * wildcard character near the beginning of a word will slow searches somewhat.

Natural Language Searching

A natural language search request is any combination of words, phrases, or sentences. After a natural language search, the search tool sorts retrieved documents by their relevance to your search request. Weighting of retrieved documents takes into account: the number of documents each word in your search request appears in (the more documents a word appears in, the less useful it is in distinguishing relevant from irrelevant documents); the number of times each word in the request appears in the documents; and the density of hits in each document. Noise words and search connectors like NOT and OR are ignored.

Synonym Searching

Synonym searching finds synonyms of a word in a search request. For example, a search for fast would also find quick. You can enable synonym searching for all words in a request or you can enable synonym searching selectively by adding the & character after certain words in a request. Example: fast& w/5 search.

The effect of a synonym search depends on the type of synonym expansion requested on the search form. The search tool can expand synonyms using only user-defined synonym sets, using synonyms from the built-in thesaurus, or using synonyms and related words (such as antonyms, related categories, etc.) from the built-in thesaurus.

Fuzzy Searching

Fuzzy searching will find a word even if it is misspelled. For example, a fuzzy search for apple will find appple. Fuzzy searching can be useful when you are searching text that may contain typographical errors, or for text that has been scanned using optical character recognition (OCR). There are two ways to add fuzziness to searches:

  1. Enable fuzziness for all of the words in your search request. You can adjust the level of fuzziness from 1 to 10.
  2. You can also add fuzziness selectively using the % character. The number of % characters you add determines the number of differences the search tool will ignore when searching for a word. The position of the % characters determines how many letters at the start of the word have to match exactly. Examples:

Phonic Searching

Phonic searching looks for a word that sounds like the word you are searching for and begins with the same letter. For example, a phonic search for Smith will also find Smithe and Smythe.

To search for a word phonically, put a # in front of the word in your search request. Examples: #smith, #johnson

You can also check the Phonic searching box in the search form to enable phonic searching for all words in your search request. Phonic searching is somewhat slower than other types of searching and tends to make searches over-inclusive, so it is usually better to use the # symbol to do phonic searches selectively.

Stemming

Stemming extends a search to cover grammatical variations on a word. For example, a search for fish would also find fishing. A search for applied would also find applying, applies, and apply. There are two ways to add stemming to your searches:

    1. Check the Stemming box in the search form to enable stemming for all of the words in your search request. Stemming does not slow searches noticeably and is almost always helpful in making sure you find what you want.
    2. If you want to add stemming selectively, add a ~ at the end of words that you want stemmed in a search. Example: apply~

Variable Term Weighting

When sorting search results after a search, by default all words in a request count equally in counting hits. However, you can change this by specifying the relative weights for each term in your search request, like this:

apple:5 and pear:1

This request would retrieve the same documents as apple and pear but, the search tool would weight apple five times as heavily as pear when sorting the results.

In a natural language search, the search tool automatically weights terms based on an analysis of their distribution in your documents. If you provide specific term weights in a natural language search, these weights will override the weights otherwise assigned.

AND Connector

Use the AND connector in a search request to connect two expressions, both of which must be found in any document retrieved. For example:

apple pie and poached pear would retrieve any document that contained both phrases.

(apple or banana) and (pear w/5 grape) would retrieve any document that (1) contained either apple OR banana, AND (2) contained pear within 5 words of grape.

OR Connector

Use the OR connector in a search request to connect two expressions, at least one of which must be found in any document retrieved. For example, apple pie or poached pear would retrieve any document that contained apple pie, poached pear, or both.

W/N Connector

Use the W/N connector in a search request to specify that one word or phrase must occur within N words of the other. For example, apple w/5 pear would retrieve any document that contained apple within 5 words of pear. The following are examples of search requests using W/N:

(apple or pear) w/5 banana

(apple w/5 banana) w/10 pear

(apple and banana) w/10 pear

Some types of complex expressions using the W/N connector will produce ambiguous results and should not be used. The following are examples of ambiguous search requests:

(apple and banana) w/10 (pear and grape)

(apple w/10 banana) w/10 (pear and grape)

In general, at least one of the two expressions connected by W/N must be a single word or phrase or a group of words and phrases connected by OR. Example:

(apple and banana) w/10 (pear or grape)

(apple and banana) w/10 orange tree

The search tool uses two built in search words to mark the beginning and end of a file: xfirstword and xlastword. The terms are useful if you want to limit a search to the beginning or end of a file. For example, apple w/10 xlastword would search for apple within 10 words of the end of a document.

NOT and NOT W/N

Use NOT in front of any search expression to reverse its meaning. This allows you to exclude documents from a search. Example:

apple sauce and not pear

NOT standing alone can be the start of a search request. For example, not pear would retrieve all documents that did not contain pear.

If NOT is not the first connector in a request, you need to use either AND or OR with NOT:

apple or not pear

not (apple w/5 pear)

The NOT W/ ("not within") operator allows you to search for a word or phrase not in association with another word or phrase. Example:

apple not w/20 pear

Unlike the W/ operator, NOT W/ is not symmetrical. That is, apple not w/20 pear is not the same as pear not w/20 apple. In the apple not w/20 pear request, the search tool searches for apple and excludes cases where apple is too close to pear. In the pear not w/20 apple request, the search tool searches for pear and excludes cases where pear is too close to apple.

Numeric Range Searching

A numeric range search is a search for any numbers that fall within a range. To add a numeric range component to a search request, enter the upper and lower bounds of the search separated by ~~ like this:

apple w/5 12~~17

This request would find any document containing apple within 5 words of a number between 12 and 17.

Numeric range searches only work with positive integers. A numeric range search includes the upper and lower bounds (so 12 and 17 would be retrieved in the above example).

For purposes of numeric range searching, decimal points and commas are treated as spaces and minus signs are ignored. For example, -123,456.78 would be interpreted as: 123 456 78 (three numbers). Using alphabet customization, the interpretation of punctuation characters can be changed. For example, if you change the comma and period from space to ignore, then 123,456.78 would be interpreted as 12345678.

Opinion specific examples

For Rendered Date:     put in specific date in this format: Month Date, Year i.e. June 17, 1999
For KB opinions:         -KB
For subject matter:       type in specific keywords i.e. death penalty, sex offender
For lower court case number:   type in specific case number

You may type in any words that appear in any opinion.  Be as specific as possible for fewer opinions, or more general to find a wider range of opinions.  Whatever you type in must appear exactly that way in the opinion in order to be found (meaning that 6/17/99 will not return instances of June 17, 1999).

How to change Highlight Hit color

The color used to highlight hits in Adobe Reader is controlled by the client machine's Display Options in Windows. The specific option is the "Selected Items" color, which defaults to white-on-blue. If you change it to black-on-yellow, Adobe Reader will show highlights in yellow. (This will also make your Windows menus and list boxes use yellow highlights.)   To do this, go to your Control Panel and open Display Options.  Click on Appearance and under item, choose Selected Item.  Change those colors to black-on-yellow or the colors of your choice.