In an application filed with the state Prosecutors Advisory Council, Taylor’s mother, Tamika Palmer, requested that a different prosecutor consider charges against the Louisville police officers who fatally shot her daughter in March. Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron (R) denied grand jurors the right to bring indictments reflecting their belief that the officers were not justified in killing Taylor, Palmer wrote.
“The Attorney General’s unwillingness and refusal to prosecute Breonna’s case, despite grand jurors confirming that they found probable cause to indict the officers on multiple offenses, calls into question whether we face a ‘stacked deck’ when the perpetrators are members of law enforcement,” Palmer’s application said.
The Prosecutors Advisory Council and spokespeople for Cameron, who chairs the council, did not respond to a question about whether the committee will consider Palmer’s request.
A grand jury indicted fired officer Brett Hankison in September on three counts of wanton endangerment allegedly perpetrated against three people in a neighboring apartment when some of his bullets entered their home. He has pleaded not guilty.
No one was charged directly with killing Taylor, a 26-year-old emergency room technician, while officers carried out a search warrant at her home shortly after midnight March 13. The warrant says officers thought she was receiving packages for her ex-boyfriend, who was allegedly trafficking drugs.
On Friday, a third anonymous grand juror came forward to say they wanted to promote transparency in the case. “Anonymous Grand Juror #3 firmly supports the fact that no additional charges were allowed at the conclusion of their service,” said a statement sent through their attorney.
During a conference call with reporters Wednesday, the original two anonymous grand jurors said appointing a new prosecutor would be “the appropriate way to proceed.” The two men asked to speak about the grand jury proceedings after Cameron characterized the lack of additional charges as the jury’s decision, and a judge last week granted their request.
The jurors told reporters that they disagreed with Cameron’s assertion while announcing the charging decision that although Taylor’s death was a tragedy, it was not a crime.
“I don’t agree with his statement that this was simply a tragedy,” the first juror said. “I believe there were other charges that could have been brought.”
Prosecutors presented the Taylor case in the opposite order of the other cases they brought before jurors, the anonymous jurors said. They said in the other cases, prosecutors explained the charges they wanted to bring and then provided evidence, while in Taylor’s case they showed evidence for two and a half days, and then disclosed the recommended charges.
That order confused jurors because the presentation seemed to be building to charges more serious than the wanton endangerment ones that were put forth, the first juror said.
The jurors also alleged that prosecutors withheld evidence that they requested — an action that Kevin Glogower, an attorney for the jurors, said contradicts Kentucky’s rules of criminal procedure. The jurors wanted, for example, to see the videos of police investigators’ interview with the officers involved in the raid, rather than just listening to the audio.
“A lot of times when we asked questions or we asked for more information, we were told either they would circle back to it or it wasn’t relevant or something to the degree that we weren’t going to get that,” the first juror said.
When prosecutors told the jury they only recommended wanton endangerment charges, almost every juror asked whether there were any other options, the first juror said.
“It was asked more than once if any other charges could be brought against all three of the officers, and the reply was none that they could make stick,” he said.
Prosecutors told the jury that the other two officers involved in the raid, Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly and Detective Myles Cosgrove, were justified in returning fire after Taylor’s boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, fired one shot first, the jurors said. But they said the prosecutors did not explain the state’s self-defense laws or any other charges that they had considered.
Walker has said he did not hear the officers announce their presence and thought they were intruders when they burst through the door. His shot struck Mattingly in the leg, according to Cameron.
The grand jurors characterized the raid on Taylor’s apartment as a chaotic scene where officers did not know what to do and no one stepped up to lead. The second grand juror said he believed the officers never identified themselves as law enforcement before they broke down the door with a battering ram.
Although the officers had a “no-knock” warrant, they have said they knocked and announced their presence several times. Walker and about a dozen neighbors have said they did not hear that. An additional neighbor has made various assertions about what he remembered, including that he heard officers yell “Police!” or that he heard them identify themselves only in passing or that he did not hear them identify themselves at all.
Asked whether they thought any of the officers’ behavior was “criminal,” the jurors said yes and that the 16 shots fired by Cosgrove were “excessive.” They pointed to his statement to police investigators that he could not see anything in the moments after he fired as evidence that he shot without being able to see his target.
A ballistics analysis by the FBI determined that Cosgrove fired the shot that killed Taylor, while a separate analysis by Kentucky State Police was inconclusive. Taylor was shot six times in total, according to Cameron.
The second juror said officers skipped over a lot of safeguards in planning for the raid and should not have moved forward.
“They made mistake after mistake after mistake,” he said. “And we know what the result was.”
Editor’s note: This story has been updated since it was originally published Oct. 28.