When the law is to blame

By Kaffie H. Sledge

People like Breonna Taylor have nothing to protect them except the law. Black and brown people know all too well, however, that the law can sometimes be a mortal enemy.

According to television news and other media reports, Taylor, a 26-year-old black woman, was killed March 13, 2020, when white police officers from Louisville, Ky. Metro Police Department broke down the door and forced their way into her apartment.

Taylor’s boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, thinking the police officers were intruders, fired a warning shot, wounding Officer Jonathan Mattingly

In response, Mattingly and two of his fellow officers, Brett Hankison and Myles Cosgrove, opened fired. In the aftermath, it was determined that Cosgrove fired the fatal shot.

Let’s skip ahead to the current episode of this tragedy. (I promise to fill in the blanks.)

In connection to Taylor’s fatal shooting, a U.S. District Judge Charles Simpson, a week ago, dropped felony charges against former Louisville police detective Joshua Jaynes and former Sgt. Kyle Meany.

Simpson, a Ronald Reagan appointee, said Taylor’s boyfriend was at fault for her death.

This almost feels like the bad old days when sexual assault and rape victims were said to be responsible for what happened to them if their heels were too high, or their blouses cut too low.

“US Attorney General Merrick Garland first announced federal charges against Jaynes and Meany in August 2022 during a high-profile visit to Louisville,” Fox News reported. “Garland, accused Jaynes and Meany, who were not present during the fatal 2020 police raid of Taylor’s Apartment of knowing they had falsified part of the warrant that put the 26-year-old woman in a dangerous situation by sending armed officers to her door.”

Simpson said the actions of Taylor’s boyfriend were the legal cause of her death, not a bad warrant, the Associated Press reported.

Not so, others argue.

If police hadn’t lied and gotten a no-knock warrant, they would not have been at Taylor’s house. If they hadn’t broken through the door without announcing they were police, there would have been no gunshot. And without a gunshot there would have been no death.

Civil rights and social justice attorneys are dumbfounded by Simpson’s ruling, said Ben Crump, attorney for the Taylor family. Crump called the police officers’ actions unnecessary, unjustifiable and an affront to the Fourth Amendment against unlawful search and seizure.

“And yet the judge says there’s nothing they did to cause her death. Instead, they want to blame her boyfriend, a black man who is legally in the apartment and who has a legal right to be a registered gun owner, who tries to defend his home, his woman and himself,” Crump told Democracy Now. “And this is what you say is the cause of her death?”

Crump said black women in this country have been denied justice throughout the history of the country when they have been abused, assaulted, murdered, raped and disregarded.

There are two justice systems in this country, Crump said, one for whites and one for blacks.