Summary
The Kentucky Supreme Court considered whether Kentucky’s slow-moving-vehicle emblem statute, KRS 189.820, violated the religious-freedom protections of Sections 1 and 5 of the Kentucky Constitution as applied to Old Order Swartzentruber Amish defendants. The court held that the statute is neutral and generally applicable, regulates highway safety, and only incidentally burdens religious practice. Applying rational-basis review, the court upheld the statute and affirmed the defendants’ convictions and penalties.
Topics
Practice areas
Questions Presented
- Whether Sections 1 and 5 of the Kentucky Constitution provide greater protection for the free exercise of religion than the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.
- Whether a generally applicable highway-safety statute that incidentally burdens religious practice is subject to rational-basis review or strict scrutiny under the Kentucky Constitution.
- Whether KRS 189.820, requiring slow-moving vehicles to display a specified warning emblem, violates the appellants' constitutional right to free exercise of religion.
Holdings
- The free-exercise-of-religion protections in Sections 1 and 5 of the Kentucky Constitution provide no greater protection than the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.
- Governmental enactments serving public health, safety, and welfare that are generally applicable and only incidentally affect religious practice are subject to rational-basis review; enactments directly prohibiting or restraining a religious practice are subject to strict scrutiny.
- KRS 189.820 is constitutional because it is a neutral statute of general applicability directed at highway safety, not at religious practice, and has a rational basis.
Key quotations
“This Court now finds that statutes, regulations, or other governmental enactments which provide for the public health, safety and welfare, and which are statutes of general applicability that only incidentally affect the practice of religion, are properly reviewed for a rational basis under the Kentucky Constitution, as they are under the federal constitution. Enactments that directly prohibit or restrain a religious practice are subject to a strict scrutiny standard of review.” (at 844)
“Since the Kentucky Constitution provides no greater protection to religious practice than the federal Constitution does, this Court will follow federal precedent, and thus the statute is presumed constitutional unless there is no rational basis for it.” (at 844)
Factual background
The appellants, members of the Old Order Swartzentruber Amish, operated horse-and-buggy vehicles on Kentucky highways during daylight hours without displaying the fluorescent yellow-orange, red-bordered slow-moving-vehicle emblem required by KRS 189.820. They believed the emblem's bright color and triangular shape conflicted with their religious commitment to plainness and its symbolic meaning. The appellants proposed gray or silver reflective tape as an alternative, but the lower courts found that the tape did not provide an equivalent daytime warning and that the statutory emblem improved visibility and highway safety.
Procedural history
The appellants were stopped and ticketed for operating horse-and-buggy vehicles on Kentucky highways without the required slow-moving-vehicle emblem. Three defendants were convicted after a joint bench trial and six after a joint jury trial in Graves District Court. The Graves Circuit Court affirmed both sets of convictions, and the Kentucky Court of Appeals unanimously affirmed, applying rational-basis review and, additionally, strict scrutiny. The Supreme Court of Kentucky granted discretionary review and affirmed.