A grand juror in the Breonna Taylor case has spoken out against claims made by Kentucky attorney general Daniel Cameron, stating that the jury was never offered homicide charges to consider against the officers involved in the killing of Taylor.
The grand juror made the anonymous comments after a Louisville judge allowed the panel’s members to speak publicly about the secretive proceedings. The juror didn’t file suit to speak publicly, however, until Cameron announced that no officers would be directly charged for the shooting death of Taylor during a botched narcotics raid that wasn’t even meant to occur at Taylor’s residency.
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Instead, the grand jury only charged one officer out of the four with endangerment of Taylor’s neighbors due to the fact that some of the dozens of bullets fired hit her neighbors home; but no charges were made for the bullets that hit Taylor. The grand juror claims that when the jury asked about bringing other charges against the officers, they were told “there would be none because prosecutors didn’t feel they could make them stick,” according to the statement.
Cameron has also been quite adamant about not allowing the grand jurors to speak about the proceedings, but didn’t appeal the judges ruling either. This could likely be because on September 23rd when Cameron announced the results of the grand jury investigation that resulted in one endangerment charge, he claimed that prosecutors “walked the grand jury through every homicide offense,” a claim that has now been refuted.
Cameron also claimed that the “grand jury agreed” that the officers who shot Taylor were justified in their returning fire after Kenneth Walker, Taylor’s boyfriend, shot at the officers who barged into their home without any warning or announcement that they were law enforcement. The gun Walker had was legally owned as well.
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However, the grand juror also refuted these claims and stated that the “panel didn’t agree that certain actions were justified, and grand jurors did not have homicide charges explained to them. The grand jury never heard anything about those laws. Self defense or justification was never explained either.”
Kevin Glowgower is the grand juror’s attorney, who claims that his client’s biggest discrepancy with the Kentucky attorney general is the way that the results were “portrayed to the public as to who made what decisions and who agreed with what decisions.”
Beyond the statement posted on Tuesday the grand juror has no intention of speaking out further about the cases proceedings. Cameron has only acknowledged that his prosecutors didn’t present homicide charges due to the fact that the two officers who shot and killed Taylor were justified in returning fire after Walker shot them.
Cameron said Tuesday that it was his decision “to ask for an indictment that could be proven under Kentucky law. Indictments obtained in the absence of sufficient proof under the law do not stand up and are not fundamentally fair to any one.”
Breonna Taylor was a Black emergency medical technician who was working on the frontlines of the Covid-19 pandemic when she was shot multiple times in her own home while she was sleeping by white police officers who barged into the home. The officers were raiding the home as a part of an ongoing narcotics investigation, however, the officers didn’t announce their identity upon arrival and didn’t find any drugs in the home either. Her death fueled the already burning fires of racial justice in America, as protests against police brutality in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement have been ongoing since the spring.
Eric Mastrota is a Contributing Editor at The National Digest based in New York. A graduate of SUNY New Paltz, he reports on world news, culture, and lifestyle. You can reach him at eric.mastrota@thenationaldigest.com.
