Breonna Taylor raid: Experts explain why felony charges against 2 former officers were dismissed

CNN
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Four years after Breonna Taylor was shot and killed in her home, a federal judge has dismissed felony charges against two former Louisville Metro Police Department detectives who worked on the search warrant in the forced-entry raid.

Louisville detective Joshua Jaynes and Sgt. Kyle Meany were federally charged in 2022 with submitting a false affidavit to search Taylor’s home ahead of the LMPD’s raid, then working together to create a “false cover story in an attempt to escape responsibility for their roles in preparing the warrant affidavit that contained false information,” according to court documents.

But US District Court Judge Charles Simpson ruled Thursday that the decision by Taylor’s boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, to fire his gun when officers burst into the home was “the legal cause of Taylor’s death,” rather than warrantless entry, according to court documents.

The dropped charges carried a maximum sentence of life in prison. Motions to dismiss other charges were denied and the two still face civil rights charges and could be sentenced to years in prison.

Here’s why the judge made the decision and how CNN’s legal analysts interpret it.

Jaynes and Meany stand accused of willfully depriving Taylor of her constitutional rights by drafting and approving a false affidavit to obtain a no-knock search warrant, while knowing “the affidavit contained false and misleading statements, omitted material facts, relied on stale information, and was not supported by probable cause,” the Department of Justice said in a 2022 statement. Both men “knew that the execution of the search warrant would be carried out by armed LMPD officers, and could create a dangerous situation both for those officers and for anyone who happened to be in Taylor’s home,” it said.

However, Judge Simpson concluded the falsified affidavit for a warrant was not what killed Taylor.

“Taylor’s death was proximately caused by the manner in which the warrant was executed,” court documents say. “[Kenneth Walker’s] decision to open fire, as alleged and argued, was the natural and probable consequence of executing the warrant at 12:45 a.m. on ‘an unsuspecting household.’ That decision prompted the return fire which hit and killed Taylor.”

In the early hours of March 13, 2020, when officers executed the warrant at Taylor’s apartment, she was in bed with Walker when the officers announced their presence and then battered down the front door.

Taylor and Walker yelled to ask who was at the door but got no response, Walker said afterward. Thinking they were intruders, Walker grabbed a gun he legally owned and fired a shot when the officers broke through the door.

That triggered a volley of fire from the officers. Taylor, who was standing in a hallway with Walker, was shot multiple times. Walker was not injured.

“From the prosecutor’s perspective, they say that from the moment where these police officers provided false information to a judge to get this warrant and then went and executed the warrant, knowing that the information that was provided was false, that every single thing that happens after that is a violation of the law and that the civil rights of Breonna Taylor were violated,” said Misty Marris, a defense attorney and CNN legal analyst.

“But the defense’s argument is, yes, even assuming we did that, when the officers came into the home, Breonna Taylor’s boyfriend shot at the police officers, which caused them to respond by shooting back, and because of the boyfriend’s shot, that cut off legal causation to hold the officers criminally responsible for her death,” Marris added.

CNN legal analyst Joey Jackson disagreed with the judge’s decision. He said although Walker’s gunshot resulted in the officers firing back, Walker’s reaction was to be expected.

“The judge is saying, well Walker fired a shot and that breaks up the causal chain of events, and therefore the officer had nothing to do with this and it was Walker,” Jackson said. “But in the law, intervening events are only excusable if they’re not foreseeable. But in this case, is it not reasonably foreseeable when you’re executing a no-knock warrant that someone might defend their home by having a gun? A person has a right to defend their property, particularly when they don’t know who’s coming in. You’re going to put it on the person who defended their property, and not the police who caused them to do so?”

“Their conduct, to me, did result in the death, because without them lying, they would not have been at that house, and without them busting down the door, there would have been no gunshot, and without a gunshot, there would have been no death,” Jackson said.

While the former officers were charged with using a dangerous weapon to deprive Taylor of her Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable search, Simpson’s order said it has not been proven the “Execution Team used their firearms for the purpose of subjecting Taylor to the search.”

With the use-of-a-dangerous-weapon language struck by the judge, the charge becomes a misdemeanor punishable by a fine and/or imprisonment for no more than one year, according to court documents.

“The federal district court judge basically reduced the civil rights charges. The original civil rights charge was a violation of Breonna Taylor’s civil rights to be free of unreasonable search and seizure, resulting in her death. The ‘resulting in her death’ part vastly increases the seriousness of the crime and punishment, and the judge threw out the ‘resulting in death’ part of the charge because the judge said any violations in getting the search warrant were not the cause of her death,” said Elie Honig, a former federal prosecutor and CNN senior legal analyst.

“What the judge said is the more direct cause of her death was the boyfriend firing at the cops, which caused the cops to return fire. This does not mean the case is dismissed. They still face the lesser civil rights charges, and the police officers still face charges relating to false statements in their affidavit to get the search warrant. But the most serious potential charge is off the table.”

Meany still faces one charge of false statement to federal investigators, which carries a maximum of five years in prison. Jaynes faces charges of falsification of records in a federal investigation and conspiracy to falsify records and witness tampering. If convicted, Jaynes could be sentenced to a maximum of 40 years.

Brett Hankison, another former LMPD detective federally charged in connection with Taylor’s death, will face a new civil rights trial in October after a jury was deadlocked in his initial trial. Prosecutors alleged Hankison used unjustified force the night Taylor was killed and violated her civil rights and those of her boyfriend and next door neighbors. He could face life in prison if found guilty.

Ex-detective Kelly Hannah Goodlett pleaded guilty in federal court in 2022 to conspiring to falsify an affidavit for a warrant to search Taylor’s home and to covering up the false document by lying to investigators. Goodlett has yet to be sentenced.

Taylor, along with Atatiana Jefferson and Sonya Massey, are among a group of Black women killed in their homes by law enforcement in recent years.

“Obviously we are devastated at the moment by the Judge’s ruling with which we disagree and are just trying to process everything,” Taylor’s family said in a statement obtained by CNN affiliate WLKY. “The Assistant United States Attorneys on the case have informed us of their plan to appeal. The only thing we can do at this point is continue to be patient. The appeal will extend the life of the case but as we’ve always maintained, we will continue to fight until we get full justice for Breonna Taylor.”

Jackson said the decision is concerning because it sends a message to citizens that “accountability in our justice system is a big problem” and that incidents like this will happen again.

“The decision is very well reasoned, and the judge justifies the logic, but just because something is well reasoned and logical doesn’t mean that that should be our reality,” Jackson said. “Because of the fact that we are in such a bizarre set of circumstances. I think people are losing trust and losing hope in our system of justice and that’s a problem.”

Taylor’s death at first went largely unnoticed outside Louisville. By the end of May 2020, Walker’s distressed 911 call from the night Taylor died had been released, and George Floyd had died days earlier at the hands of police in Minneapolis, sparking nationwide protests in the summer of 2020 calling for police reform.

CNN’s Paradise Afshar, Dalia Faheid, Eliott C. McLaughlin, Sonia Moghe and Hannah Rabinowitz contributed to this report.