Sherry Ballard won't stop fighting: her push to close the legal loophole that let Houck family off the hook
They broke the law, they faced no consequences, and now Sherry Ballard is fighting to change that.
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Sherry Ballard has spent the last ten years fighting for answers about her daughter Crystal Rogers' 2015 disappearance. She's endured unimaginable loss- both Crystal and her own husband, Tommy Ballard, who was killed in 2016. Last year, she finally saw justice when Brooks Houck was convicted of murdering Crystal.
But even with that conviction, Sherry discovered something that still haunts her: Brooks and his family had secretly recorded grand jury proceedings years earlier, violating the sanctity of one of the most protected legal processes in Kentucky. When investigators found the tape recorders while executing a search warrant at his mother, Rosemary Houck's home, prosecutors told Sherry there was nothing they could do about it.
The reason? Kentucky's statute of limitations for this violation is just one year.
"It was so frustrating for me as a mother to go through what I had been through," Sherry told me. "You think a grand jury, that's a huge thing, and then you hear that they can't even use that against them. It was a shock to me."
So instead of taking a break after her hard-won victory in court, Sherry has picked up another fight- this time, to change Kentucky law so no other family has to experience what she did.
House Bill 305, sponsored by State Representative Candy Massaroni (R), and co-sponsors Representative Josh Calloway (R), and Representative TJ Roberts (R), would change how Kentucky handles violations of grand jury secrecy by creating new penalties for recording or disclosing grand jury proceedings. Here's what the bill would do: