Mark White

What does it mean when a jail sentence is conditionally discharged or that somebody received a pretrial diversion? We occasionally get questions about what certain court terms in stories mean. I had a lady call me a few weeks ago asking about court terminology. She suggested that we consider running a glossary type listing about some of these terms on our public records page. I can’t really come up with a good way of doing a glossary on our public records page each week because of the amount of space that would take up so instead I decided to write this column about the subject in hopes of giving readers a...

In the era of COVID-19, some of our government agencies are getting creative when it comes to members maintaining social distancing while still meeting. One of the more creative approaches I have seen was the Whitley County Water District earlier this month, when the three board members met in the parking lot so that they could maintain social distancing of at least six feet. Most agencies though are going high tech in order to keep meeting so they can perform their public duties. Here are a few examples. The Corbin City Commission and the Whitley County Fiscal Court met last week utilizing Facebook Live streams to pipe the meetings to their constituents...

In case the COVID-19 pandemic wasn’t real enough for everyone, it really hit home for residents of Whitley and Knox counties Monday, as each county had its first confirmed case of COVID-19. Sadly, we all know that these probably won’t be the last cases of the coronavirus that we will see locally, and the stark reality is that it is probably only a matter of time before we have our first local death from COVID-19. Chances are that it will be an elderly person, someone with a compromised immune system, or perhaps someone with both. There is a good chance it will be someone we know, maybe a friend, or a...

As you might have guessed, how to cover a worldwide pandemic is not a topic they cover in journalism school, although I suspect it might be added to the curriculum this fall…LOL. Truth be told, I don’t think this is a topic that gets covered by trainers for almost any profession besides maybe infectious disease specialists and public health providers. The reality is nobody in pretty much any profession has a playbook for how to handle the COVID-19 pandemic. I think I can speak for many people in saying that if someone does then I would love to see it. To News Journal readers and the community at large, I would like...

With the outbreak of the coronavirus, let’s face it things have gotten to be just a little bit, well, nuts for lack of a better description. One person at the health department Friday compared a recent trip to Walmart to a scene from the television show, “The Walking Dead” where survivors of a zombie plaque go into empty supermarkets scavenging for food among nearly empty shelves. My wife put it another way describing Kroger crowds as worse than at Christmas or before a snow, which in southeastern Kentucky is really saying something. After all everyone knows you have to go buy milk and bread before we get that 1/16 of an...

Imagine for a moment that you have an ethically-challenged local judge-executive, who is stealing money from their office, not that this kind of thing would ever happen in real life in the Commonwealth of Kentucky…LOL. Now imagine that the Kentucky Auditor of Public Accounts – while doing a routine annual audit – discovers $100,000 in unaccounted for money missing from such an office, and issues a scathing audit with a recommendation that the FBI or Kentucky State Police investigate the matter. Now imagine that our ethically-challenged office holder has the option of either having this audit published in its entirety in the local newspaper, which has thousands of readers, or this...

Best wishes to my pal, Trent Knuckles, on his future endeavors now that he has left the News Journal. As many of you know, Friday was Trent’s last day as publisher. He is leaving after 24 years to pursue other interests. A part of me will miss him, while another part of me is happy for him to be making a fresh start, and taking on new endeavors in life. There are two things that are certain regarding Trent’s departure. The first is that our Corbin office will definitely be a lot quieter with Trent gone. The second is that it should be much easier to get through on the office telephone...

So what would downtown Williamsburg have looked like in recent days if the floodwall hadn’t been in place? “I think we would have been riding a boat down Third Street taking pictures,” said Whitley County Emergency Management Director Danny Moses to this reporter’s question early Monday afternoon. During the 1977 record flood in Williamsburg, this is exactly what some people did in the flooded downtown area. Williamsburg Mayor Roddy Harrison even recalls getting in trouble for boating in floodwaters as a youngster. I imagine the scene was very similar in places like Harlan, Middlesboro, Pineville and Barbourville during that flood. In recent days, flooding like this didn’t happen in several cities across southeastern...

It’s important not only to avoid impropriety, but also to avoid the appearance of it. These were the words that a couple of wise-old judges, the late Jerry Winchester and the late Paul Braden, used to tell me when they were asked to recuse themselves as the judge in a case. It’s one of many lessons that now former Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin would have been wise to have learned before he left office last month. He didn’t. Prior to leaving office, Bevin issued several controversial pardons, including pardons to convicted killers. One of the more controversial pardons was to Patrick Baker, a Knox County man, who had served two years of...

Over the last 12 years that Kay Schwartz has served as Whitley County Clerk, if you went into her office to pay your car taxes or any number of other things, you were just as likely to get waited on by Kay as you were one of her deputy clerks most days. I know. I speak from experience. If Kay was in her office, she was usually busy working either answering questions for somebody either in person or on the phone, looking something up on the computer or waiting on customers. She was the kind of official that wouldn’t ask her employees to do anything she wouldn’t do herself. A case...