How do judges of the Supreme Court of Kentucky reach the bench?

The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.

Supreme Court of Kentucky / Joined 2008 / Former Justice

Daniel J. Venters

Justice, Supreme Court of Kentucky

Daniel J. Venters was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Kentucky, who joined the court in 2008. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1950 · age 76
Tenure: 2008 · 18 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
2008	Supreme Court of Kentucky	–	–

Education

University of Kentucky

Judicial Record

In our data, Venters authored 173 published opinions for the court (2008–2017), plus 35 dissents and 31 concurrences. Most cited: Foley v. Commonwealth (169 citations).

Published, precedential opinions from the CourtListener corpus. Counts and rankings are objective and recomputable: how we count. We describe the record, not the judge. 238 of these were attributed to Venters by a unique court-, date-, and surname-match against our roster (marked ), because CourtListener recorded no author for them. Each links to the official text to verify. How we match.

Selected opinions

Year	Case	Citation	Cited
2014	Foley v. Commonwealth†	425 S.W.3d 880	169
2012	Osborne v. Keeney· Concurrence†	399 S.W.3d 1	145
2015	Sargent v. Shaffer†	467 S.W.3d 198	142
2009	Breathitt County Board of Education v. Prater· Dissent†	292 S.W.3d 883	137
2013	Ordway v. Commonwealth†	391 S.W.3d 762	131
2011	Caesars Riverboat Casino, LLC v. Beach†	336 S.W.3d 51	113
2010	Blankenship v. Collier· Dissent†	302 S.W.3d 665	107
2008	Pennington v. Marcum· Dissent†	266 S.W.3d 759	101
2009	Commonwealth v. Jones· Concurrence†	283 S.W.3d 665	97
2013	Martin v. Commonwealth†	409 S.W.3d 340	96
2013	Energy Home, Division of Southern Energy Homes, Inc. v. Peay†	406 S.W.3d 828	86
2010	Wilburn v. Commonwealth†	312 S.W.3d 321	86
2016	The Kentucky Shakespeare Festival, Inc. v. Brantley Dunaway†	490 S.W.3d 691	84
2009	MPM Financial Group, Inc. v. Morton†	289 S.W.3d 193	84
2010	Hunt v. Commonwealth†	304 S.W.3d 15	79

Showing the 15 most-cited of 239 authored opinions in our data. “Cited” is inbound citations across the CourtListener corpus. Case links open the ruling’s full text (CourtListener) or its page here; read the methodology and verify against the primary source.

Questions & answers

How do judges of the Supreme Court of Kentucky reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.
Which court was Daniel J. Venters on?: Daniel J. Venters was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Kentucky.

Sources

Each fact on this page traces to a primary public record.

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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18 years on the Supreme Court of Kentucky. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).