Shot dead during a police raid in her own home, Breonna Taylor’s name has been elevated to the pantheon of names that others are called upon to ‘say’ during BLM marches.
‘Say her name’.
She has been held up as an example of police wrongly and recklessly ending the lives of black civilians.
The only problem with that accusation is that it presumed the guilt of the officers involved. It got ahead of the investigation and hung an albatross of guilt around the necks of officers involved.
It also created a public expectation of the legal system arriving at a particular finding of guilt. But in our system, guilt is not presumed. Innocence is.
Guilt must be proven. And we’re nowhere near that stage of the game yet.
But what we DO know at this point is which charges the Grand Jury has decided were warranted in this case, and which were not.
The crowds, having long since whet their appetites for murder charges against all three, will not be happy with their findings.
Here’s what we know:
– The FBI has wrapped up an investigation into all aspects of the Breonna Taylor case and will be weighing whether any Federal charges beyond what the Grand Jury came back with.
– None of the 3 Kentucky officers involved in the incident have been charged with murder relating to the death of Breonna Taylor.
– One of the officers faces charges of a much lesser offence, ‘wanton endangerment’. This charge relates to him having fired his weapon into neighboring apartments during the incident.
– Two of the officers were authorized to use force in the incident owing to the fact that the boyfriend fired the first shot.
There was a detail we had never been told before, one that amounted to a major plot twist even more critical to the facts of the case than the fact that her boyfriend fired first.
Despite the fact that the warrant given them was, strictly speaking, a no-knock warrant, the officers in question DID knock and they did announce themselves as being police.
A witness corroborated that claim.
The details here change everything we thought we knew.
But don’t expect it to change the minds of anyone.
Kentucky AG Daniel Cameron says that the night #BreonnaTaylor died, police did knock and announce themselves before Breonna’s boyfriend shot at them. This fact was verified by an independent witness to the events who lived nearby. pic.twitter.com/0ipTvVYv7r
— Robby Starbuck (@robbystarbuck) September 23, 2020
