Fayette Commonwealth Attorney explains judicial process; in light of murder indictment of man who claims he’s innocent

LEXINGTON, Ky. (WTVQ) — A lexington man maintains he’s innocent, despite being charged with murder.

ABC 36 spoke with Kimberly Henderson Baird the Fayette County Commonwealth Attorney to talk about the process.

Henderson Baird has no easy tasks, but one thing is certain, “there are people who have put their heart and souls into this to protect victims, to protect the public and the prosecutors in protecting the rights of defendants.”

She says the biggest misconception of her office is how cases are processed and although she can’t go into specifics about certain ones, she explained the judicial process from her view.

“Any time there’s a person arrested, all of those cases start in district court, and with the county attorney and they handle initially the misdemeanors and the felony preliminary hearings.  If there’s probable cause for the case to be sent to my office, when it comes to my office, we then conduct, the grand jury hearing, those grand jurors are randomly picked,” she says.

Adding that when a grand jury indicts someone its because there is sufficient competent evidence for it to move forward.

“If they’re charged with murder, we obviously don’t want them released without any bond conditions. Also, the standard is different. So I said a grand jury, the standard is sufficient competent evidence for the case to go forward for trial. It’s beyond a reasonable doubt and it requires all 12 in a unanimous verdict.
And so just because a police officer charges you, you know, we may get more information, we may talk to the defense attorney, you know, his client and get more information we need to follow up on. So a lot of times that doesn’t happen until afterwards. So we keep going. So we can’t necessarily wait for the lab and that backlog to do that because we have a time frame on the front end,” she also says.

Henderson Baird also sends a message for those indicted and their families, “just wait till all the evidence comes out.”

The grand jury has no previous knowledge of certain people involved in different cases, all they know is the information presented to them.

The reason why some cases move forward without lab results is because the commonwealth does have a specific time frame to present their case to the grand jury when they have someone in custody.