Judge rules Breonna Taylor's boyfriend, not police, was responsible for her death – Mother Jones

A wall portrait of Breonna Taylor Julio Cortez, File / AP

More than four years after Police in Kentucky entered Breonna Taylor's home in the middle of the night and shot her to death. Her family is still fighting for justice. And this week, a federal judge dealt them a major blow.

On Thursday, Ronald Reagan-appointed U.S. District Judge Charles Simpson dismissed charges against two former Louisville police officers involved in the raid that led to Taylor's death. Instead, the judge ruled that Taylor's boyfriend was legally responsible for her death. The officers face additional charges.

Former Detective Joshua Jaynes and former Sergeant Kyle Meany were not present during the raid on Taylor's home in March 2020, but they allegedly lied to obtain a search warrant for other officers who wanted to enter the house in search of drugs. Taylor, a black 26-year-old medical professional, had fallen asleep while watching the film Freedom Authors when just after midnight, seven plainclothes police officers burst through her door. Her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, mistook the officers for intruders and fired a single shot, and the officers returned with a volley of bullets that struck Taylor. As she lay wounded, Walker called 911, still not realizing that it was the officers who had attacked her.

In 2022, the Justice Department filed civil suits against four current and former officials involved in her death, including Jaynes and Meany. Not long afterward, I wrote a profile of Taylor's aunt, Bianca Austin, who told me the family was relieved to hear the charges. “I was just so happy,” Austin said of the charges. “I'm just grateful that the Justice Department decided to do its job, that someone decided to stand up and say, 'This is not right.'”

A few weeks after the charges were filed, one of the four officers, Kelly Goodlett, pleaded guilty. Goodlett said she and her colleagues lied to obtain the search warrant by claiming to have evidence they did not have. Specifically, she said she did not stop Jaynes when he falsely claimed to have evidence that a drug dealer was sending packages to Taylor's apartment. According to prosecutors, the search warrant application also said the dealer used Taylor's address as his own, even though investigators knew the dealer did not live there. No drugs were found on the premises.

The lies are said to have continued later. The news of Taylor's death sparked great outrage. Thousands protested. As the public backlash grew, prosecutors say Goodlett and Jaynes met in Jaynes' garage to make plans to cover up their false statements. And prosecutors say Meany lied to the FBI.

The two officers who actually shot Taylor – Jonathan Mattingly and Myles Cosgrove – were never charged. Prosecutors said they did not know their colleagues had lied to obtain the warrant. Instead, the Justice Department blamed the four other officers for Taylor's death. But on Thursday, Judge Simpson disagreed. “While the prosecution alleges that Jaynes and Meany set off a chain of events that ended in Taylor's death, it also alleges that [Taylor’s boyfriend, Walker] disrupted these events when he decided to open fire on police,” Simpson wrote. Walker's “decision to open fire,” he added, “is the legal cause of her death.”

The ruling effectively reduced some of the charges against Jaynes and Meany, which had carried a maximum sentence of life in prison, to misdemeanors. But the officers are not completely off the hook: The judge declined to throw out a conspiracy charge against Jaynes and a charge against Meany of lying to the FBI. Goodlett, who pleaded guilty to the federal charges, is expected to testify against them at their trials. A fourth former officer, Brett Hankison, also faces a retrial on federal charges in October.

Taylor's family said prosecutors plan to appeal this week's ruling. “We are, of course, devastated,” the family wrote in a statement to the Associated Press. “The only thing we can do at this point is to continue to be patient … we will keep fighting until we get full justice for Breonna Taylor.”