KENTUCKY
Daily News
Associated Press
The Kentucky Court of Appeals has rejected an attempt by a Lexington man to withdraw his guilty plea to beating to death a convicted sex offender and retired priest with a pickax.
Judge Michelle M. Keller wrote on Friday that 32-year-old Jason Anthony Russell cannot show he was too incompetent to seek to back out of the agreement with prosecutors within three years of going to prison.
Russell is serving a 30-year sentence at the Kentucky State Penitentiary in Eddyville. His projected release date is Dec. 12, 2033.
He pleaded guilty in 2005 in Lexington to attacking and killing 78-year-old Joseph Pilger, who previously admitted to abusing four boys in western Kentucky in the 1960s when he was a pastor in Sturgis.
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