A federal judge in Kentucky ruled that two police officers accused of falsifying a warrant ahead of the deadly raid that killed Breonna Taylor were not responsible for her death, The Associated Press reports. And rather than the phony warrant, U.S.
District Judge Charles Simpson said Taylor’s boyfriend, Kenneth Walker , was responsible for her death because he fired upon the police officers first — even though he had no idea they were police officers. The ruling was handed down earlier this week in the civil rights violation case against former Louisville Police Detective Joshua Jaynes and former Sgt. Kyle Meany.
The two were not present at the March 2020 raid when Taylor was killed. Instead, in 2022, Attorney General Merrick Garland accused the pair (along with another detective, Kelly Goodlett) of submitting a false affidavit to search Taylor’s home before the raid and then conspiring to create a “false cover story..
. to escape responsibility” for preparing the phony warrant. Prosecutors had argued that this phony warrant put Taylor in danger.
But Simpson dismissed the claim that armed officers conducting a middle-of-the-night raid on a no-knock warrant based on made-up intel that a suspected drug dealer was receiving packages at Taylor’s apartment had anything to do with her eventually being shot and killed. “There is no direct link between the warrantless entry and Taylor’s death,” Simpson wrote. Instead, he argued that Walker was far more responsible.
W.