ADVERTISEMENT

Column: The Breonna Taylor case is heartbreaking, but not a ‘miscarriage of justice’

cigaretteman

HR King
May 29, 2001
77,113
58,286
113
Good column by the liberal columnist Eric Zorn:


At a news conference in Chicago on Wednesday afternoon, Gov. J.B. Pritzker referred to a Louisville, Kentucky, grand jury’s decision not to charge police officers in the death of Breonna Taylor as “a gross miscarriage of justice” and a “terrible miscarriage of justice.”

Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton added that “justice was denied" in the Taylor homicide, and Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle called the grand jury decision a “travesty” and “tremendous injustice.”


It wasn’t.


To be clear, what happened to Taylor was unjust — tragic and outrageous, heartbreaking and infuriating. The 26-year-old Black EMT was unarmed and posing no threat to anyone when she died in a hail of police bullets during a botched, ill-conceived middle-of-the-night raid on her apartment March 13. A national cry went up to arrest and prosecute the white officers who killed her.

But the problem with pursuing that remedy was that Taylor’s boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, had fired the first shot in the fatal altercation, striking one of officers in the leg. Walker said afterward that he hadn’t heard police identify themselves before they knocked the door down, and he fired down a darkened hallway thinking the intruder was a former boyfriend of Taylor’s.

The police had a “knock-and-announce” warrant that required them to identify themselves before attempting to gain entry to Taylor’s apartment. They were searching for illegal drugs, which were not there, and two suspected drug dealers — who also were not there.




Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron said the police did properly announce themselves, though Walker and other witnesses disagree and there is no bodycam video to settle the point. In remarks to the media Wednesday, Cameron said the grand jury concluded that the police had every right under Kentucky law to fire back toward Walker in self-defense, unintentionally and fatally wounding Taylor who was standing near him. “This justification bars us from pursuing criminal charges in Miss Breonna Taylor’s death," Cameron said.

The grand jury charged one of the officers with the comparatively minor offense of wanton endangerment because he allegedly fired bullets that went into a neighboring apartment.

“Justice is not often easy,” said Cameron, an African American who served as the special prosecutor in charge of the investigation. "It does not fit the mold of public opinion, and it does not conform to shifting standards. It answers only to the facts and to the law. … If we simply act on emotion or outrage, there is no justice.

“In our system, criminal justice isn’t the quest for revenge, it’s the quest for truth,” Cameron said. “Do we really want the truth, or do we want a truth that fits our narrative?”

Many on the left won’t take Cameron’s word. He’s a protege of Republican dark lord Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, he spoke at last month’s GOP convention and his name appeared recently on President Donald Trump’s shortlist of possible Supreme Court nominees.

But Wednesday’s announcement should have come as no surprise to readers of the Louisville Courier-Journal, which on July 30 published an account of the newspaper’s survey of seven experienced local attorneys, three of them Black, all of whom agreed that murder or manslaughter charges against the officers would not be appropriate.

African American defense attorney Jan Waddell told the Courier-Journal, “The seemingly unending list of unarmed Black men who have been and continue to be gunned down by white police officers … does not and cannot justify the return of an indictment based on revenge rather than the facts of the case and the law.”

Should the law be different? Louisville has since banned the use of no-knock warrants, which only might have made a difference in the Taylor homicide, and the city recently included some police reform measures in a $12 million civil settlement with Taylor’s mother.

But the idea that police should be barred from returning fire when fired upon is not a good one. And although the warrant itself seems to have been based on outdated, inaccurate intelligence, nothing I’ve read about the case, including a nearly 7,000-word New York Times investigation published Aug. 30, suggests that the officers on the scene were responsible for that grievous error.

True miscarriages of justice are gross, terrible and tremendous travesties. They tend to occur when individuals are scapegoated and profiled, and when emotion overcomes the search for truth.

“Our flawed system of justice often feels unfair,” said Mayor Lori Lightfoot at that same news conference.




Deeply. Many horrible crimes go unpunished and many sickening outcomes have no legal remedy.


Wednesday’s announcement “leaves more questions than it answers,” Lightfoot said, which at least seemed to acknowledge that perhaps a partial understanding of a very complicated and painful circumstance wasn’t an excuse to attack the outcome and inflame passions.

A failure of caution touched off this dreadful event. Why keep it going?

 
I agree. From what I've read, it certainly sounds like the police screwed up at multiple points here, but to straight up say they murdered Taylor isn't accurate.

This reflects more on flaws in the process/police training as much as anything else. Based on the fact that Louisville settled with the family suggests a tacit recognition of that.
 
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT