Kentucky AG Will Release Grand Jury Recording in Breonna Taylor Case
Kentucky attorney general Daniel Cameron agreed on Monday to release the recording of grand jury proceedings in the Breonna Taylor case, following a court order.
Taylor, an African American EMT from Louisville, Ky., was shot to death in a botched drug bust by Louisville police in March. (Police did not find drugs in Taylor’s apartment.) The case received renewed attention following the George Floyd demonstrations against police brutality. Only one of the officers involved in the raid, Brett Hankison, has been indicted by a grand jury on three counts of wanton endangerment for firing his weapon recklessly during the raid.
One of the jurors filed a motion in court on Monday afternoon to make the jury proceedings public.
“The full story and absolute truth of how this matter was handled from beginning to end is now an issue of great public interest and has become a large part of the discussion of public trust throughout the country,” Kevin Glogower, the juror’s attorney, wrote in the motion, as reported by the Louisville Courier-Journal. The juror accuses Attorney General Cameron of using the grand jury “as a shield to deflect accountability and responsibility for those decisions.”
In a separate action on Monday, Jefferson Circuit Judge Ann Bailey Smith ordered the release of grand jury proceedings during former officer Hankison’s arraignment.
“The grand jury is meant to be a secretive body,” Attorney General Cameron said in a statement on Monday. “It’s apparent that the public interest in this case isn’t going to allow that to happen.”
Two officers involved in the shooting of Taylor were not charged by the grand jury. Cameron maintains that the grand jury agreed those two officers fired their weapons in self-defense, and that Taylor’s boyfriend had opened fire on officers, with a licensed handgun, believing that the officers were intruders.
“Our prosecutors presented all of the evidence, even though the evidence supported that Sgt. Mattingly and Detective Cosgrove were justified in their use of force after having been fired upon by Kenneth Walker,” Cameron said.
Following the indictment of Hankison last week, demonstrators marched through Louisville in protest of the decision to charge just one of the officers involved in the shooting. Those demonstrations devolved into riots, during which two Louisville officers were shot.
