Commonwealth v. Lawson

Opinion of the Court by

Justice SCOTT.

I. BACKGROUND

In 1999, a Laurel Circuit Court jury found Appellee, Leslie Lawson, guilty of second-degree arson, second-degree burglary, and of being a first-degree persistent felony offender (PFO), for which Ap-pellee was sentenced to a total of eighty years’ imprisonment. However, it is uncontested that the trial court erred by giving Appellee only nine peremptory strikes during voir dire, instead of the eleven to which he was entitled. RCr 9.40. Due to Appellee’s counsel’s failure to preserve the error at trial, this Court declined to review the issue of…