A federal judge has acquitted two former Louisville police officers of felony charges in connection with the shooting of Breonna Taylor, instead finding Taylor’s boyfriend responsible for her death.
In an order Thursday, U.S. District Judge Charles Simpson dismissed felony charges of “deprivation of rights by force of law” against former Louisville police detective Joshua Jaynes and former sergeant Kyle Meaney.
U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland first announced the federal charges against Jaynes and Meaney during a high-profile visit to Louisville in August 2022. Garland charged that Jaynes and Meaney, who were not present during the deadly 2020 police raid on Taylor’s apartment, knowingly forged parts of the warrant and sent armed officers to her home, putting the 26-year-old Black woman in a dangerous situation.
Simpson asserted that the legal cause of Taylor’s death was the actions of Taylor’s boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, who fired shots at police on the night of the attack, and not as a result of an arrest warrant.
The city of Louisville agreed to pay Walker $2 million in December 2022 to settle lawsuits filed in state and federal courts amid anti-police protests across the U.S. following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
In March 2020, when police breached the door of Taylor’s home while executing a narcotics search warrant, Walker shot former Sergeant Jonathan Mattingly in the leg, saying Walker thought an intruder was breaking in. Officers returned fire, shooting and killing Taylor in the hallway. Simpson concluded that Walker’s “conduct was a proximate or legal cause of Taylor’s death.”
In his ruling last week, the judge said there was “no direct link between the warrantless entry and Taylor’s death.”
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“The indictment alleges that Jaynes and Meaney initiated the sequence of events that led to Taylor’s death, but it also alleges that (Walker) disrupted those events by deciding to fire on the officers,” Simpson wrote.
The judge effectively reduced the civil rights charges against Jaynes and Meaney, which could have carried a maximum sentence of life in prison, to misdemeanors.
Kenneth Walker stands in front of a portrait of Breonna Taylor at the protest memorial in Jefferson Square Park on March 13, 2021 in Louisville, Kentucky. (John Cherry/Getty Images)
Judge Simpson refused to dismiss the conspiracy charge against Jaynes and another charge against Meaney for allegedly making false statements to FBI agents.
“We are very pleased with the court’s decision,” Meaney’s attorney, Brian Butler, told the Louisville Courier Journal.
“This denial puts the burden on the United States to decide how to proceed with rejecting this order,” Janes’ lawyer, Thomas Clay, told The Wall Street Journal.
“We are obviously devastated by the judge’s ruling, we don’t agree with it and we are just trying to make sense of it all,” Taylor’s family said in a statement Friday, according to WLKY.
“The assistant U.S. attorney handling this case has informed us that they plan to appeal,” the statement added. “At this point, all we can do is remain patient. An appeal will prolong the case, but as we have always maintained, we will continue to fight until full justice is achieved for Breonna Taylor.”
The Justice Department said in an email to The Associated Press that it is “reviewing the judge’s decision and considering next steps.”
Former police Sergeant Kyle Meaney will testify in Louisville on Feb. 23, 2022. (AP Photo/Timothy D. Easley, Pool)
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A third former officer indicted in the federal warrant case, Kelly Goodlett, pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges in 2022 and is expected to testify against Jaynes and Meaney at trial.
Federal prosecutors alleged that Jaynes, who prepared the warrant for Taylor’s arrest, claimed to Goodlett days before the warrant was executed that he had “confirmed” from postal inspectors that a suspected drug dealer had received a package at Taylor’s apartment. But Goodlett knew that was false and told Jaynes that the warrant didn’t yet contain enough information to link Taylor to criminal activity, prosecutors said.
Jaynes added a line that the suspected drug dealer was using Taylor’s apartment as his current address, according to court records.Two months after Taylor’s shooting began making national headlines, Jaynes and Goodlett met in Jaynes’ garage to “get on the same page” before Jaynes told investigators about the warrant for Taylor’s arrest, according to court records.
A fourth former officer, Brett Hankison, was also charged by federal prosecutors in 2022 with firing shots into a window of Taylor’s home, endangering the lives of Taylor, Walker and neighbors.
A state jury acquitted Hankison in 2022 of a charge of intentional endangerment.
A photo of Breonna Taylor taken at the second annual Pro-Black Women protest at Black Lives Matter Plaza in Washington, DC on July 30, 2022. (Lee Vogel/Getty Images via Frontline Action Hub)
A federal trial on alleged civil rights violations last year ended with a hung jury. Hankison is scheduled to be retried on the same charges in October.
Clay told The Wall Street Journal that the Justice Department is waiting for the outcome of Hankison’s October retrial before setting a trial date for Jaynes and Meaney.
An FBI ballistics investigation determined that the bullet that killed Taylor was likely fired by former Louisville detective Myles Cosgrove.
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Neither Cosgrove nor Mattingly was 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.
