Kentucky’s Administrative Office of the Courts and Kentucky State Police announced last week that a program aimed at modernizing the way search warrants get requested and evaluated is now live in all 120 counties.
The eSearch Warrant program allows police officers to virtually request warrants in the field during investigations – and for judges to authorize or deny them remotely.
In a release, KSP Maj. Bradley Arterburn said the agency wants to bring a new level of efficiency to search warrants in the state.
“[It] allows us to use proven technology in new ways that help our troopers and local officers act quickly and securely when it matters most,” Arterburn said. “The expansion modernizes how law enforcement and the courts work together, streamlining communication, improving efficiency and strengthening public safety across the commonwealth."
The program was developed after the state’s law enforcement community faced scrutiny regarding search warrant processes in the wake of the Louisville police killing of Breonna Taylor in 2020.
The Louisville Metro Police Department detective who applied for the warrant to search Taylor’s apartment was fired in 2021 after he was found to have lied on the warrant application. An audit of the department that year also identified problems with how officers prepared affidavits used to obtain warrants, saying “supervisory review was minimal.”
According to a release, the AOC and KSP were already collaborating on the program before a task force led by the state attorney general’s office recommended in 2021 that they work toward a statewide digital process for requesting and processing warrants.
The first counties came online in September 2022, with new counties added on a monthly basis through October 2025. The last counties to join the program were Allen, Boyle, Letcher, McLean, Mercer, Muhlenberg and Simpson. Agencies in the state’s largest counties – including the Lexington Police Department and the 43 law enforcement agencies that serve Jefferson County – also joined the program this year.
According to an AOC release, the new program works off an eWarrant platform KSP has used since 2009. It uses a case management system component provided by the AOC and was developed for the state police by the third-party software company LexisNexis. Its creation was authorized by the Supreme Court of Kentucky in 2023.
AOC director Zach Ramsey called the program’s launch “a significant milestone” for the state’s justice community, and one that he thinks will bring more security, efficiency, control and accountability to the search warrant process.
“This progress also brings us a step closer to what will be another major achievement – a completely electronic court record.”
Malissa Carman-Goode, the eCourt manager for Kentucky’s AOC, said the system officers use for the program uses a wizard interface, similar to sites like TurboTax, that allows them to quickly build out warrant applications.
“It just sort of steps you through essentially the search warrant form, application forms and affidavits,” she said.
After officers deem it necessary to request a warrant and go through the submission process, Carman-Goode said what happens next can be slightly different depending on local jurisdictions. In some places, the warrant is sent to the requesting officer’s supervisor or the commonwealth’s attorney for review. In others, it goes straight to the presiding judge, who can grant or deny the application.
Kentucky’s far from the first state to bring such a system online.
Tracy Hresko Pearl is a law professor at the University of Oklahoma, studying the intersection between the U.S. justice system and emerging technologies. She’s written that more than half the country now has a similar electronic system in place for warrants.
Pearl said that, while these programs can help accelerate the process to get a warrant granted for law enforcement, she’s concerned that it might lead to less stringent reviews of applications.
“We want to interject a neutral magistrate – a judge – between police and citizens to ensure that the investigation that police want to do is backed up by probable cause. It's really important to have this kind of neutral arbiter assessing whether police have met the constitutional threshold that they're required to meet to conduct a search,” she said. “What worries me about e-warrants is that it allows that exchange between police and a magistrate to happen, really, without any conversation at all.”
Before the search warrant process went electronic, Pearl said that judges had the opportunity to talk with officers and ask for more information during the review process. But now, she said those talks aren’t happening in some places.
“With e-warrants, what we're finding in many cases is not only is that conversation not taking place, but the review that magistrates are engaging in is much shorter than they would with a traditional paper warrant application,” Pearl said.
The AOC eCourt manager said Kentucky’s eSearch Warrant program does have a point of friction that forces interaction between judges and officers.
“It requires the judge to have that contact with the officer,” Carman-Goode said. “However they choose to do it, right, the judge does have to have that contact with the officer.”
Carman-Goode said, before a warrant can be reviewed by a judge, officers must be sworn in by their county attorney or by the presiding judge, just as they would be if they submitted the warrant in-person to a judge.
“The judge is going to review all of that, but before they do anything they have to swear the officer [their] oath in reviewing it, and the system will not let them go forward if that's not done,” Carman-Goode said. “The system requires that. So it's a hard stop.”
But in other states that have rolled out digital warrant systems, judges have only spent moments looking over those applications. For example, a study published by Pearl found several cases in Utah where magistrates approved warrant applications after less than 30 seconds of review.
She said that when a review process like this accelerates too rapidly, the rights of citizens and individual constitutional rights come into the line of fire. She said the ease of this new, digital process leads to less scrutiny and fewer rejections for warrant applications.
“In some senses, it's a great technology when police are on the ground and maybe we have a quickly evolving situation. It allows police to get warrants very quickly … but, in situations in which police and magistrates are not paying careful attention, it also opens up the possibility that we're having warrant applications granted that shouldn't be granted,” Pearl said.
As of the Kentucky program’s statewide launch last week, 6,681 search warrant applications had been filed since its pilot launch in 2022. Just 73 – slightly more than 1% of the applications – were denied. The rest have already been executed or are granted and awaiting execution.
Pearl said that electronic search warrant systems that mandate interactions between judges and requesting officers, and that foster transparency by including information like timestamps and the names of judges who approve applications, can make the programs safer for citizens.
“When we make policing harder, it's typically for a very good reason. It's to prevent cases like Breonna Taylor from happening and to ensure that, when police are acting, they're doing so in good faith and they're doing so while upholding the constitutional rights that we all have,” Pearl said. “When we're talking about protecting individual rights, not everything should be as easy as ordering a sandwich.”
