Ed Indictment in Breonna Taylor case.

[TurkeysGhost]

Seems to me that the only reason for dark-of-night warrants with rams is to give cops overtime and hazzard pay.
If they wanted to search the place, they could have done it during the day.

That's the obvious conclusion. If you take the position that the cops opening fire was lawful, then the system that lead to such a pointless killing is at fault.

We have a raid that resulted in a dead unarmed woman and a cop shot and the legal conclusion is that nobody, not cops or the guy that shot at them, committed a crime. 1 dead and 1 wounded and the only indictment is incidental because some cop went rambo and sprayed the whole building with gunfire like a moron.

What's maddening is that this horrible screwup has been decided as a natural consequence of the policies in place, but nothing is being done to change the policies to prevent such a disaster.

12 million paid out for a wrongful death and the city has no interest in preventing it from happening again.

Breonna Taylor wasn't some cocaine cowboy that never set foot outside of her fortified crack house. These people easily could have been apprehended during daylight hours to execute a search warrant.
If surprise is absolutely necessary, just snag her while checking the mail or at the grocery store, not by kicking in the door in the wee hours

A raid never should have been approved. The police culture and war on drugs have totally lost all sense of proportionality, and the deaths will continue until that is changed.

 

[Roboramma]

A raid never should have been approved. The police culture and war on drugs have totally lost all sense of proportionality, and the deaths will continue until that is changed.

This.

 

[The Great Zaganza]

Crimes which would actually show up in the statistics.

but as you said, drug use is self-reported, i.e. it is not being investigated by cops very much. If it was, all the crime surrounding drug use would show up.
But where there is no cop there is no crime ...

 

[Olmstead]

Sure, I think that's an important factor. But there are some crimes that aren't just going undiscovered, murder for instance. It's still true that those crimes happen more often in underprivileged neighborhoods.

There are socioeconomic drivers for that I think we should be doing something about.

I don't think that's really relevant. No knock warrants aren't employed to investigate murder. Usually, it's about drugs. Rich people use illegal drugs. Rich kids use illegal drugs. The response should be proportionate*.

It's the whole rich people go to rehab, poor people go to prison thing.


* Of course, personally I'd like them to just tone down the war on drugs across the board.

 

[Delphic Oracle]

Ah yes, the perfectly unfalsifiable belief. Every piece of information - no matter how contradictory or nonsensical - fits conveniently into your predetermined narrative.

Yeah, the DA that just got an indictment for shooting at drywall, but not Breonna, that DA is scared of protests.

Uh-huh. I have recently acquired rights to a bridge if you are interested, contact this Nigerian Prince i know...

And I'm pretty sure he's intentionally dropping the word "lynch" over and over on purpose.

 

[Skeptic Tank]

Actually, under your imaginary scenario where Breowna was hiding under a comforter, quaking in fear, and the officers kicked in the door and ordered her to remove the comforter and raise both hands in the air so the officers could be assured that she was unarmed and that there were no weapons within reaching distance and she did not immediately comply, the officers would have been negligent to not empty their magazine into her, reload, and continue shooting if she was still twitching.

I usually agree with you, Mr. Tank, but sometimes your empathy, open-mindedness, compassion, and concern for the underdog clouds your thinking.

Considering the facts of what actually happened, as soon as Briiowynnna's booty call pointed a gun at a police officer and pulled the trigger, nobody in the apartment had any reasonable expectation of leaving that apartment alive. The tragedy here, and the reason that Louisville should be burned to the ground is that Kenneth Walker is not dead.

This was quite funny and had me laughing out loud for real.

Btw, I didn't spell her name incorrectly as some sort of dig or on purpose, I lapsed back into the spelling of the name I am more familiar with.

 

[Shadowdweller]

One of Kenneth Walker's attorneys has been making the following claims:
* The witness that corroborates the police having announced themselves before entry originally claimed the opposite during initial interviews. And it was not until months afterward that said individual changed their narrative.

* Ballistic evidence at the Kentucky state police lab was also inconclusive as to whether Walker shot Sgt. Mattingly. This was presumed by the prosecutor to be Walker given that the bullet was of different caliber than the police firearms. However, if we're going to hold that lab as sufficiently authoritative so as to produce reasonable doubt in the matter of who shot Taylor...

--------

One of the enduring questions I have about the shooting is the matter of -who- collected evidence. While a different jurisdiction - the Kentucky State Police - handled the actual investigation, I remain concerned that much of the physical evidence and narrative framing of the event was performed by the officers or the LMPD themselves; people who had either a vested personal stake in the outcome or a working relationship with those who did.

 

[Bob001]

Yes, there is a reason Walker is not being charged. It's because the person who recommended charges would be lynched by the same insane people who are rioting and have shot two innocent police officers because the correct legal decision has been made exonerating the two police officers of criminal charges in the death of Taylor.
Paying out 12 million was a hope to stop the rioting and civil unrest. It didn't work.

Gee, you think maybe Walker wasn't charged because he was found to be using a legally possessed firearm in the lawful defense of his home against a midnight invasion? If he was charged, imagine the access he'd have to police and witness records and testimony. Imagine his lawyers deposing everybody associated with this murder, from the police chief and judge on down, and cross-examining them on the stand. I hope they do charge him.

 

[Bob001]

The DA couldn't get it past a grand jury, which is a low bar.

He could have if he wanted to. The cliche is that a DA can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich. If he told the grand jury "I have to present this to you, but there are no grounds to prosecute," they'd act accordingly. Let's see the transcript of the grand jury proceeding.

 

[I Am The Scum]

Yes, there is a reason Walker is not being charged. It's because the person who recommended charges would be lynched by the same insane people who are rioting and have shot two innocent police officers because the correct legal decision has been made exonerating the two police officers of criminal charges in the death of Taylor.
Paying out 12 million was a hope to stop the rioting and civil unrest. It didn't work.

Please stop making stuff up.

 

[shuttlt]

If the police believe there could be innocent people who might get hit then yes, I don't believe they should be discharging their weapons. Yes I do believe the police should have a high bar to reach before opening fire. They are police officers, they are there to protect the public.

I think there is a tension here. The more you increase the circumstances in which it isn't permissible to use lethal force, the more police are going to have to take the decision at an earlier stage based on more limited information.

I know people on the forum have complained about cops shooting armed, or potentially armed mentally ill people. Under your proposal the police would have a choice. Either they shoot the mentally ill person at a relatively early stage (the forum generally thinks that is bad), while there is still no possibility (is that ever really a thing?) of any stray bullets hitting anybody, or wait to see if anything bad develops and then allow it to play out since at that point it's a chaotic situation and one can't be 100% sure only to hit the bad guy.

There may be benefits to your proposal, but I think there are definitely downsides as well.

 

[Bob001]

.....
I know people on the forum have complained about cops shooting armed, or potentially armed mentally ill people.
.....

Let's just note that there is an enormous gulf between "armed" and "potentially armed." Some of the most notorious police killings have been the result of cops presuming that somebody might be armed when he wasn't. I think fair-minded people recognize that cops have a right to defend themselves. But only against an immediate, imminent, certain deadly threat, not against somebody reaching into a pocket or opening a glove compartment. If that means the cop has to wait a beat to see what comes out of the pocket or the glove compartment, that's a risk he's paid to take.

In this case the cops might have had a right to defend themselves against somebody shooting at them. But they still had an obligation to identify their target.

 

[johnny karate]

I think he's saying that rich people don't live in areas with a lot of crime, so we should expect less police activity near rich people, not because they're rich, but because there is less crime where they live.

Seems reasonable.

The point of the original question was to highlight social and racial inequity in the criminal justice system.

So no, not it’s reasonable to respond with something inanely beside the point.

 

[Brainster]

Whole bunch of details showing Breonna's involvement in the drug trade here.

Glover made a call from jail about 12 hours after he was arrested March 13 at 2424 Elliott Ave. — the same day Taylor was shot and killed by police executing a search warrant at her apartment signed by Jefferson Circuit Judge Mary Shaw.

In that recorded March 13 call, Glover, 30, told a girlfriend that Taylor was holding $8,000 for him and that she had been “handling all my money.” No money was found at her residence during the police search.

By the way, if you've heard that the cops went to the wrong house, you've been lied to. The search warrant was for Breonna's address and mentioned her name specifically.

 

[Butter!]

deleted

 

[johnny karate]

Whole bunch of details showing Breonna's involvement in the drug trade here.

So the additional details are that a criminal made a claim for which no evidence was found to corroborate?

Wow, great scoop.

By the way, if you've heard that the cops went to the wrong house, you've been lied to. The search warrant was for Breonna's address and mentioned her name specifically.

By the way, if you heard that Breonna Taylor was getting “drug packages” mailed to her house, you’ve been lied to. And the people lying to you are the police.

 

[JoeMorgue]

Will the racist get another tune then "Well they were a no-good dirty thug who got what was coming to them."

Newsflash the police murdering people where guilty of some crime at some point in the past is still murder.

 

[johnny karate]

Will the racist get another tune then "Well they were a no-good dirty thug who got what was coming to them."

Newsflash the police murdering people where guilty of some crime at some point in the past is still murder.

And there’s also the fact that we keep getting presented all this ironclad evidence that Breonna Taylor was deeply involved in the drug trade, and yet the police still had to make **** up to get a search warrant for her home.

 

[JoeMorgue]

Which is why I always spend these discussion not letting the "And therefore the black person deserved to be murdered" just being this unsaid subtext and making sure the racists have to say it directly.

 

[Disbelief]

Which is why I always spend these discussion not letting the "And therefore the black person deserved to be murdered" just being this unsaid subtext and making sure the racists have to say it directly.

Don't forget that previous crimes which a victim might already have served time for, is also a justified reason for them to be executed by police.