Federal Judge Shields Officers Who Aided Breonna Taylor’s Murder

Read our editorial on the increasing reactionization of the state here.

Louisville, KY. — On August 20, a federal judge threw out the most serious civil rights charges against two Louisville Metro Police Department officers who aided the 2020 murder of Breonna Taylor. Detective Joshua Jaynes and Sgt. Kyle Meany were both charged with felony deprivation of rights under color of law after being accused of providing and lying about false information in the search warrant used by other LMPD officers to murder the 26-year-old Black nurse.

In 2022, former LMPD Detective Kelly Goodlett pleaded guilty to the same conspiracy charge faced by Jaynes for falsifying the warrant and covering it up. Goodlett admitted to a federal court that she reviewed the affidavit Jaynes had written and, instead of correcting it, added to it so it could get approved. The officers fabricated evidence that an individual they were investigating for drug trafficking had connections with Taylor’s home so that they could get a warrant. This “no-knock” warrant gave police officers the legal right to break into Taylor’s home on the night of March 13, 2020, when the police barged into the home and murdered Taylor.

However, the federal judge ignored this body of evidence, and instead doubled down on calling the “actions” of Kenneth Walker, Taylor’s boyfriend, to be the cause of her death, and absolving the officers of their role in Taylor’s murder. In his ruling, U.S. District Court Judge Charles Simpson argued police officers may have carried guns to search Taylor’s house, but they did not “use” them until Walker fired his weapon. As Walker has repeated since his girlfriend’s murder, he only fired his weapon because he believed there was an intruder in Taylor’s residence. The judge’s argument that an armed police invasion of a house “would result in an illegal invasion of privacy but not in someone’s death” belies the reality of police terror against Black workers, in spite of being directly confronted with such an instance.

While Jaynes and Meany still face lesser felony charges for falsifying the warrant and lying to cover it up, the ultra-reactionary Trump administration continues to interfere in these cases and protect the police. Since Simpson issued this ruling, the Department of Justice has asked U.S. District Court Judge Rebecca Grady Jennings to sentence Brett Hankison—the police officer that fired 10 shots into Taylor’s apartment that nearly hit her as well as a family and child sleeping in a neighboring apartment—to only one day of jail, which he already served when he was initially booked. This comes after he was sentenced to only 33 months in prison earlier this year.

Such federal intervention is part of the trend of the intensifying reactionization of the state, with increasing power and control centralized around the executive branch. The ruling class has to heighten its oppression to facilitate increased exploitation of the working class as its economic crisis deepens. As part of this, the state erodes the democratic rights of the people, increasing police terror, particularly against immigrant and Black workers.

Photo: Joshua Jaynes, Sgt. Kyle Meany. Credit: Oldham County Jail.

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