Last Wednesday, Ronald Exantus walked out of Kentucky custody a free man, no parole, no supervision, nothing. In 2015, Exantus broke into a Versailles home and stabbed 6-year-old Logan Tipton to death in his sleep, then attacked Logan’s father and sister. At trial, a jury found him not guilty by reason of insanity on the murder charge, but guilty on the assault charges from that same break-in, and he was sentenced under the parole and sentencing rules that existed at the time, well before Republicans built a legislative majority focused on truth in sentencing. Under the Safer Kentucky Act, passed a few years later, a violent offender must serve 85 percent of his sentence before becoming parole eligible, rather than the fraction that applied to Exantus. Had that standard applied to his case, he would have served many more years behind bars.
That split verdict from 2018, not guilty by reason of insanity on the murder charge, guilty on the lesser assault charges from the same act, is exactly what House Bill 422, Logan’s Law, is designed to stop from happening again. The bill bars a jury from returning a not-guilty-by-reason-of-insanity verdict on one charge while convicting on a lesser charge arising from the same conduct in the same trial. It tightens the legal standard for the insanity defense itself, and it bars anyone with two or more violent-offender convictions, or a prior revocation of probation, shock probation, parole, or conditional discharge, from qualifying for mandatory reentry supervision going forward. The Department of Corrections will also report annually to the Legislative Research Commission on how the reentry supervision program is working.
Logan’s Law doesn’t reach back to change what happened to Exantus. It isn’t retroactive, and it couldn’t be. But between it and the Safer Kentucky Act, Kentucky has closed two separate gaps his case exposed, so the next family doesn’t have to watch the same thing happen to them.
Logan’s Law was principally sponsored by Rep. Dan Fister, Rep. TJ Roberts, and me, passing the House 93-1, the Senate 38-0, and receiving final House concurrence 87-3.