The jurors say they were never given an opportunity to consider murder or manslaughter charges in Breonna Taylor's case.
Two grand jurors in the Breonna Taylor case said Wednesday that they believed three Louisville, Ky., police officers acted with negligence when they fired into Taylor’s apartment during a botched raid that left the 26-year-old woman dead. The jurors, who spoke to the press on the condition that their identities be withheld, also said they did not believe the officers’ accounts of the shooting.
Identified simply as “Juror One” and “Juror Two,” the two male jurors spoke at length about their experiences on the grand jury during a conference with reporters that was attended by their attorney, Kevin Glogower. Asked whether he considered any of the actions by the officers to have been criminal, Juror Two didn’t hesitate.
“From the evidence that I heard, yes.” Juror Two responded, adding of the March 13 raid, “They made mistake after mistake after mistake, and we know what the result was.”
The jurors decided to go public with their account of their time on the grand jury after Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron announced last month that none of the three officers who shot into Taylor’s apartment — Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly, Detective Myles Cosgrove and former Detective Brett Hankison — would be charged directly with her death. Hankison was charged with three counts of wanton endangerment for firing into a nearby apartment.
After securing permission from a judge to speak publicly about the grand jury proceedings, the jurors told reporters Wednesday that the grand jury process, in which, according to Kentucky law, prosecutors are supposed to offer legal advice to jurors and draft indictments when requested, was highly controlled and seemed to be steered toward a specific result.
“It seemed to me that they deliberately did [the proceedings] backwards or sideways,” Juror Two said. “When we got to the end and only heard that they were going to offer three charges, there was an uproar.”
The two jurors declined to go into detail about the other jurors and declined to elaborate on what specific charges they thought should have been filed.
At a Sept. 23 press conference, Cameron said that a grand jury had declined to bring homicide charges against the three Louisville police officers. Cameron said Mattingly and Cosgrove were justified in the shooting because they fired in self-defense after Taylor’s boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, fired a warning shot “at the ground,” believing intruders were at the apartment. The bullet wounded Mattingly in the leg.
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