A federal judge cleared two former Louisville police officers of felony charges in connection to Breonna Taylor's fatal shooting and instead faulted Taylor's boyfriend for her death.
In an order Thursday, U.S. District Judge Charles Simpson dropped felony "deprivation of rights under the color of law" charges against former Louisville Police Detective Joshua Jaynes and former Sgt. Kyle Meany.
U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland first announced federal charges against Jaynes and Meany in August 2022 during a high-profile visit to Louisville. Garland accused Jaynes and Meany, who were not present during the fatal 2020 police raid of Taylor's apartment, of knowing they had falsified part of the warrant and put the 26-year-old Black woman in a dangerous situation by sending armed officers to her door.
Simpson declared that the actions of Taylor’s boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, who fired a shot at police the night of the raid, were the legal cause of her death, not a bad warrant.
The city of Louisville in December 2022 agreed to pay Walker $2 million to settle lawsuits filed in state and federal court while anti-police protests engulfed the nation following George Floyd's death in Minneapolis.
When police carrying out a drug warrant broke down Taylor’s door in March 2020, Walker fired a shot that struck an officer, former Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly, in the leg. Walker said he believed an intruder was bursting in. Officers returned fire, striking and killing Taylor in her hallway. Simpson concluded that Walker’s "conduct became the proximate, or legal, cause of Taylor’s death."
In the ruling last week, the judge said "there is no direct link between the warrantless entry and Taylor’s death."
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"While the indictment alleges that Jaynes and Meany set off a series of events that ended in Taylor’s death, it also alleges that (Walker) disrupted those events when he decided to open fire" on the police, Simpson wrote.
The judge effectively reduced the civil rights violation charges against Jaynes and Meany, which had carried a maximum sentence of life in prison, to misdemeanors.
Simpson declined to dismiss a conspiracy charge against Jaynes and another charge against Meany, who is accused of making false statements to FBI investigators.
"We are very pleased by the court’s ruling," Meany’s attorney, Brian Butler, told the Louisville Courier Journal.
"This dismissal places the burden on the United States as to how to proceed on the dismissal of this order," Jaynes’ attorney, Thomas Clay, told the Journal.
"Obviously we are devastated at the moment by the Judge’s ruling with which we disagree and are just trying to process everything," Taylor's family said in a statement on Friday, according to WLKY.
"The Assistant United States Attorneys on the case have informed us of their plan to appeal," the statement added. "The only thing we can do at this point is continue to be patient. The appeal will extend the life of the case but as we’ve always maintained, we will continue to fight until we get full justice for Breonna Taylor."
The Justice Department said in an email to The Associated Press that it "is reviewing the judge’s decision and assessing next steps."
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A third former officer charged in the federal warrant case, Kelly Goodlett, pleaded guilty in 2022 to a conspiracy charge and is expected to testify against Jaynes and Meany at their trials.
Federal prosecutors alleged Jaynes, who drew up the Taylor warrant, had claimed to Goodlett days before the warrant was served that he had "verified" from a postal inspector that a suspected drug dealer was receiving packages at Taylor’s apartment. But Goodlett knew that was false and told Jaynes the warrant did not yet have enough information connecting Taylor to criminal activity, prosecutors said.
She added a paragraph saying the suspected drug dealer was using Taylor’s apartment as his current address, according to court records. Two months later, when the Taylor shooting was attracting national headlines, Jaynes and Goodlett met in Jaynes’ garage to "get on the same page" before Jaynes talked to investigators about the Taylor warrant, court records said.
A fourth former officer, Brett Hankison, was also charged by federal prosecutors in 2022 with endangering the lives of Taylor, Walker and some of her neighbors when he fired into Taylor’s windows.
A state jury acquitted Hankison on wanton endangerment charges in 2022.
A federal trial last year on alleged civil rights violations ended with a hung jury. Hankison is scheduled to be retried on those charges in October.
Clay told the Journal that the Justice Department was waiting for the outcome of Hankison’s October re-trial before proceeding to schedule the trial of Jaynes and Meany.
FBI ballistics determined that former Louisville Detective Myles Cosgrove likely fired the bullet that killed Taylor.
He and Mattingly were not indicted on any charges by a state grand jury in 2020, and a two-year investigation by the FBI also cleared Cosgrove and Mattingly of any criminal wrongdoing.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
