Kentucky Supreme Court, 1998

The Kentucky Supreme Court affirmed the Breathitt Circuit Court’s sentence of twenty years for Pierce Neace, holding that a trial court may disregard a jury’s sentencing recommendation that falls below the statutory minimum and impose the statutory minimum.

The court affirmed the convictions and death sentences for two intentional murders after rejecting the appellant's speedy-trial, judicial-impartiality, jury-selection, evidentiary, instructional, penalty-phase, and constitutional challenges.

The court affirmed the compensatory and punitive damages judgment, concluding that the evidence supported submitting punitive damages to the jury and that successive punitive awards for the same course of conduct did not violate due process.