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A federal judge has dismissed major felony charges against two former Louisville officers accused of falsifying a warrant that led police to Breonna Taylor‘s door, where she was fatally shot.
U.S. District Judge Charles Simpson ruled that Taylor’s legal cause of death was due to a gunshot fired by her boyfriend, not a faulty warrant.
The ruling dismissed felony charges that were announced by U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland in 2022 during a high-profile visit to Louisville. The charges were against former Police Detective Joshua Jaynes and former Sergeant Kyle Meany.
Garland had accused the two, who were not present during the raid, of submitting a false affidavit to search Taylor’s home ahead of the Louisville Metropolitan Police Department’s raid. They were also accused of creating a “false cover story in an attempt to escape responsibility for their roles in preparing the warrant affidavit that contained false information,” according to court documents.
The charges carried a maximum sentence of life in prison.
However, Simpson wrote in his Tuesday ruling that “there is no direct link between the warrantless entry and Taylor’s death,” effectively reducing the civil rights violation charges against Jaynes and Meany to misdemeanors.
The judge did not dismiss a conspiracy charge against Jaynes and another charge against Meany, who is accused of making false statements to investigators.
In 2020, police broke down the door of Taylor’s apartment—where the 26-year-old emergency room technician lived—when her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, fired his gun at the officers, believing an intruder was breaking into the home. In response, police fired back, and a bullet fatally struck Taylor.
Simpson concluded that Walker’s “conduct became the proximate, or legal, cause of Taylor’s death.”
“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.
Immediately after the incident, Walker was arrested and faced attempted murder charges for firing a gun at police officers. However, the charge was later dismissed.
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.
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. He is alleged to have “willfully used unconstitutionally excessive force … when he fired his service weapon into Taylor’s apartment through a covered window and covered glass door.”
Hankison, who fired 10 shots into Taylor’s home, will face a new civil rights trial in October after a jury was deadlocked in his initial trial.
