Commonwealth of Kentucky v. Hon. Phillip J. Shepherd

Summary

The Court denied the Commonwealth's petition for a first-class writ of prohibition because the Franklin Circuit Court had subject matter jurisdiction over the inmates' declaratory and constitutional challenges to execution regulations. Any error in applying the statutory exhaustion requirement would be legal error within that jurisdiction and could be reviewed after final judgment, rather than a jurisdictional defect warranting extraordinary relief. The Court also concluded that the litigation's prolonged history and extensive merits development weighed against late-stage writ intervention.