LOUISVILLE, Kentucky — 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 door before fatally shooting her.
In his ruling, U.S. District Judge Charles Simpson ruled that the actions of Taylor's boyfriend, who fired at police on the night of the raid, were the legal cause of her death, not an invalid arrest warrant.
The federal charges against former Louisville Police Detective Joshua Jaynes and former Sgt. Kyle Meany were announced by U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland during a high-profile visit to Louisville in 2022. Garland accused Jaynes and Meany, who were not present at the raid, of knowingly falsifying part of the warrant and putting Taylor in a dangerous situation by sending armed officers to her apartment.
But Simpson wrote in his ruling Tuesday that “there is no direct connection between the warrantless entry and Taylor's death.” Simpson's ruling effectively reduced the civil rights violation charges against Jaynes and Meany, which would have carried a maximum sentence of life in prison, to misdemeanors.
The judge declined to dismiss a conspiracy charge against Jaynes and another charge against Meany, who is accused of making false statements to investigators.
When police broke down Taylor's door in March 2020 with a search warrant on drug charges, her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, fired a shot that struck an officer in the leg. Walker said he thought an intruder had broken in. Officers returned fire, striking and killing Taylor, a 26-year-old black woman, in her hallway.
Simpson concluded that Walker's “conduct was the proximate and legal cause of Taylor's death.”
“While the prosecution alleges that Jaynes and Meany set in motion a series of events that ended in Taylor's death, it also alleges that (Walker) interfered with those events when he decided to open fire on police,” Simpson wrote.
Walker was initially arrested and charged with attempted murder of a police officer, but those charges were later dropped after his lawyers argued that Walker did not know he was shooting at the officers.
An email seeking comment to the U.S. Department of Justice did not receive a response Friday morning.
A third former officer charged in the federal arrest warrant case, Kelly Goodlett, pleaded guilty to conspiracy in 2022 and is expected to testify at the trials of Jaynes and Meany.
Federal prosecutors alleged that Jaynes, who issued the warrant for Taylor's arrest, told Goodlett days before the warrant was served that he had “confirmed” from a postal inspector that a suspected drug dealer was receiving packages at Taylor's apartment. But Goodlett knew that was false and told Jaynes the warrant did not yet contain enough information linking Taylor to criminal activity, prosecutors said. She added a paragraph saying the suspected drug dealer listed Taylor's apartment as his current address, court records show.
Two months later, as Taylor's shooting made national headlines, Jaynes and Goodlett met in Jaynes' garage to “come to a common ground” before Jaynes spoke to investigators about the warrant for Taylor's arrest, court documents say.
A fourth former officer, Brett Hankison, was also charged by federal prosecutors in 2022 with endangering the lives of Taylor, Walker and several of their neighbors when he shot into Taylor's window. A trial last year ended in a hung jury, but Hankison is scheduled to be tried again on those charges in October.
