A federal judge has dismissed felony charges against two former Louisville police officers accused of forging a warrant that led police to Breonna Taylor’s home before shooting and killing her.
U.S. District Judge Charles Simpson ruled that the actions of Taylor’s boyfriend, who fired shots at police on the night of the attack, were the legal cause of her death, not the arrest warrant.
The federal charges against former Louisville police detective Joshua Jaynes and former sergeant Kyle Meaney were announced by U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland during a high-profile 2022 visit to Louisville.
Garland accused Jaynes and Meaney, who were not present at the raid, of knowingly forging parts of the warrant and sending armed officers to Taylor’s apartment, putting her in danger.
But Judge Simpson wrote in his ruling Tuesday that there was “no direct connection between the warrantless entry and Taylor’s death.”
Simpson’s sentence effectively reduced the civil rights charges against Jaynes and Meaney, which carried a maximum sentence of life in prison, to misdemeanors.
The judge declined to dismiss a conspiracy charge against Jaynes and another charge against Meaney for allegedly making false statements to investigators.
In March 2020, officers with a drug warrant broke down the door of Taylor’s home, and Taylor’s boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, fired a shot, hitting the officer in the leg.
Walker said he thought an intruder had broken in.
Officers returned fire, shooting and killing Taylor, a 26-year-old black woman, in a hallway.
Simpson concluded that Walker’s “conduct was the proximate or legal cause of Taylor’s death.”
“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.
Walker was initially arrested and charged with attempted murder of a police officer, but the charge was later dropped after his lawyers argued he did not know he was firing at officers.
“We are obviously devastated by the judge’s ruling, we don’t agree with it and are just trying to make sense of it all,” Taylor’s family said in a statement to The Associated Press on Friday.
Prosecutors have reportedly told the family they plan to appeal Judge Simpson’s sentence.
“All we can do at this point is continue to persevere. We will continue to fight until full justice is served for Breonna Taylor.”
The Department of Justice said in an email that it was “reviewing the judge’s decision and considering next steps.”
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 that he had “confirmed” from postal inspectors that a suspected drug dealer had received a package at Taylor’s apartment days before the warrant was executed.
But Goodlett knew that was false and told Jaynes the warrant didn’t yet contain enough information to link Taylor to any criminal activity, prosecutors said.
She added a line saying the suspected drug dealer was using Taylor’s apartment as his current address, according to court records.
Two months later, as the Taylor shooting made national headlines, Jaynes and Goodlett met in Jaynes’ garage and tried to “get on the same page” after 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 a shot into a window of Taylor’s home, endangering the lives of Taylor, Walker and neighbors.
A trial last year ended in a mistrial, but Hankison is scheduled to stand retrial on the same charges in October.
