A federal judge has thrown out major felony charges against two former Louisville officers accused of falsifying a warrant that led police to Breonna Taylor’s door before they fatally shot her. "There was no direct link between the warrantless entry and Taylor's death," ruled U.S. District Judge Charles Simpson, who pointed to the actions of Taylor’s boyfriend, who believed that the house was being broken into, for firing a shot at police the night of the raid. He deemed that the legal cause of her death, not a bad warrant, the Associated Press reports. Federal charges against former Louisville Police Detective Joshua Jaynes and former Sgt. Kyle Meany were announced by U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland in 2022 during a high-profile visit to Louisville. Garland accused Jaynes and Meany, who were not present at the raid, of knowing they had falsified part of the warrant and put Taylor in a dangerous situation by sending armed officers to her apartment. Though Jaynes and Meany had faced major civil-rights charges carrying a potential life sentence, Simpson's ruling effectively reduces them to misdemeanor conspiracy charges, for making false statements.
When police carrying a drug warrant broke down Taylor’s door in March 2020, her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, fired a shot that struck an officer in the leg. Walker said he believed an intruder was bursting in. Officers returned fire, striking and killing Taylor, a 26-year-old Black woman, in her hallway. 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. Walker was initially arrested and charged with attempted murder of a police officer, but that charge was later dropped after his attorneys argued Walker didn’t know he was firing at police.
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