‘It’s About Damn Time’: 4 Louisville Cops Charged in Killing of Breonna Taylor
Following two years of racial justice activism, the U.S. government on Thursday charged four current and former Louisville, Kentucky officers for alleged federal crimes related to the March 2020 killing of Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old unarmed Black woman who was shot dead in her own home during a botched police raid.
Detective Joshua Jaynes, former officer Brett Hankison, former detective Kelly Hanna Goodlett, and Sgt. Kyle Meanie are facing federal charges that U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said include “civil rights offenses, unlawful conspiracies, unconstitutional use of force, and obstruction offenses.”
The Louisville Courier Journal reports that the Federal Bureau of Investigation all four defendants.
The Justice Department alleges that Jaynes, Goodlett, and Meany violated Taylor’s Fourth Amendment rights when they attempted to obtain a warrant to search her home while knowing they lacked probable cause and that their affidavit supporting the warrant was based on lies related to alleged drug trafficking by Taylor’s ex-boyfriend.
A separate indictment charges Hankison—a former Louisville Metro Police Department (LMPD) officer who the police department dismissed in July 2020 for firing blindly into Taylor’s apartment— with using “unconstitutionally excessive force during the raid on Ms. Taylor’s home” by firing 10 shots into a neighboring apartment “without a lawful objective justifying the use of deadly force.”
No officers face direct charges of killing Taylor, including Myles Cosgrove, the LMPD officer who shot her. The police department fired him nine months later.
“The federal charges announced today allege that members of a Police Investigations Unit falsified the affidavit used to obtain the search warrant of Ms. Taylor’s home and that this act violated federal civil rights laws, and that those violations resulted in Ms. Taylor’s death,” Garland told reporters.
“Among other things, the affidavit falsely claimed that officers had verified that the target of the alleged drug trafficking operation had received packages at Ms. Taylor’s address,” said Garland. “In fact, defendants Jaynes and Goodlett knew that was not true.”
Civil rights defenders welcomed the prospect of some justice for a police killing that fueled Black Lives Matter and other racial justice protests in 2020 and beyond.
Originally published at Commondreams.org.