U.S. District Judge Charles Simpson ruled that the actions of her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, who shot at an officer and hit his leg as they broke down the couple’s door because of a drug warrant, caused Taylor’s death. The previous ruling was that a bad warrant caused her death.
The death of Taylor heavily contributed to the Black Lives Matter movement, which was rejuvenated by the killing of George Floyd several months later.
Attorney General Merrick Garland announced federal charges against former Louisville Police Detective Joshua Jaynes and former Sgt. Kyle Meany in 2022. Garland accused Jaynes and Meany, who were not present at the raid, of knowing they had falsified part of the warrant and put Taylor in a dangerous situation by sending armed officers to her apartment.
But Simpson wrote in the Tuesday ruling that “there is no direct link between the warrantless entry and Taylor’s death.” Simpson’s ruling effectively reduced the civil rights violation charges against Jaynes and Meany, which carried a maximum sentence of life in prison, to misdemeanors.
The judge declined to dismiss a conspiracy charge against Jaynes and another charge against Meany, who is accused of making false statements to investigators.
Simpson concluded that Walker’s “conduct became the proximate, or legal, cause of Taylor’s death.”
“While the indictment alleges that Jaynes and Meany set off a series of events that ended in Taylor’s death, it also alleges that (Walker) disrupted those events when he decided to open fire” on the police, Simpson wrote.
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A third officer pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges in 2022 and is expected to testify against Jaynes and Meany at their trials. A fourth was charged by federal prosecutors in 2022 with endangering the lives of Taylor, Walker, and some of her neighbors when he fired into Taylor’s windows, but their trial ended in a hung jury.
In 2022, the city of Louisville agreed to pay $2 million to settle lawsuits that Walker filed in federal and state court.
