Tag: breonna taylor

It Sure Looks Like Daniel Cameron Lied About Breonna Taylor’s Killing

It’s getting harder to deny the likelihood that Kentucky attorney general Daniel Cameron lied, and lied multiple times, when he explained why a grand jury decided not to charge any police officer with a crime for killing Breonna Taylor. Cameron’s office presented evidence to the jury, but the only criminal charges he announced last week were against Brett Hankison, the Louisville officer who fired blindly into Taylor’s apartment on March 13 and accidentally sprayed ammo into a neighboring unit. The “wanton endangerment” charge he’s facing means that the only officer who will suffer legal consequences for the events surrounding Taylor’s death, at least for now, is the only one who didn’t have a direct hand in killing her. The other officers involved, Jonathan Mattingly and Myles Cosgrove, shot Taylor six times out of more than 30 rounds fired between them.

When Cameron announced this decision to the public, he characterized it as a just resolution to a universally accepted set of facts. “The warrant [that the police used to enter the apartment] was not served as a ‘no-knock’ warrant,” he claimed, rebuking witness accounts that officers had failed to announce their presence before bursting into Taylor’s home, causing her boyfriend Kenneth Walker to think they were being burglarized and shoot one of them in the leg. Walker’s bullet was the police’s justification for opening fire, which killed Taylor, who was unarmed. But failing to announce themselves as police would undermine that defense: Under Kentucky’s “castle doctrine,” law-enforcement officers are the only home invaders that residents aren’t allowed to use deadly force against, but only if they clearly identify themselves as law enforcement.

This wasn’t the only dubious claim that Cameron expected the public to take at face value. He also said that the grand jury agreed that Taylor’s death was justified. “While there are six possible homicide charges under Kentucky law,” he explained, “these charges are not applicable to the facts before us because our investigation showed — and the grand jury agreed — that Mattingly and Cosgrove were justified in the return of deadly fire after having been fired upon.” But the grand jury may not have actually agreed.

On Monday, one of the jurors took the extraordinary step of filing a court motion to make transcripts of the grand jury deliberations public and allow its members to speak publicly about how they unfolded, according to the New York Times. Grand jury deliberations are subject to strict secrecy, and the evidence they consider usually only becomes public in court if there’s prosecution. The unnamed juror claimed that Cameron had misrepresented the jury’s case to the public, and that the jurors were never given the option to indict officers Mattingly and Cosgrove. If true, this would appear to undermine Cameron’s claim that the jury was unanimous that Taylor’s death was legally justified.

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U-Haul Seen Distributing Shields, Weapons to Louisville Rioters Rented to Holly Zoller of Soros-Connected Louisville Bail Project

The U-Haul that began distributing riot supplies in Louisville immediately following the announcement that no officers would be charged for Breonna Taylor’s death was rented to Holly Zoller of the Louisville Bail Initiative.

The pre-parked truck was loaded with shields painted with anti-police messages, umbrellas, gas masks, and other riot supplies.

Zoller confirmed it was her in a phone call from a concerned citizen who pretended to work for the rental company. You can listen to it in full at the end of this article.

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7 Ways To Keep Fighting For Breonna Taylor

In the four months after Taylor’s death, both local and national changes inspired by Taylor. As of June 11, an ordinance called “Breonna’s Law,” banning no-knock search warrants and mandating that officers wear body cameras during searches was unanimously passed in Louisville, Kentucky, according to CNN. That same day, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul introduced the Justice for Breonna Taylor Act, a bill prohibiting no-knock warrants entirely in the U.S.

Following the death of David McAtee, a Black restaurant owner who was shot and killed by the Kentucky National Guard during a June 1 protest in Louisville honoring the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, Steve Conrad, the Louisville police chief, was fired. On June 23, the city’s new police chief, Robert Schroeder, fired Brett Hankison, an officer-involved with Taylor’s unlawful death.

While these efforts are an important step in combating police brutality and systemic racism, no formal arrests or charges have been made. Here is how to continue to fight for justice for Breonna Taylor.

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