A jury in Louisville (Kentucky) acquits the only agent prosecuted
When Black Lives Matter demonstrations set America’s streets ablaze in May 2020, protesters were calling not only for justice for George Floyd, but also for Breonna Taylor. The 26-year-old nurse from Louisville, Kentucky, was sleeping in her bed with her boyfriend after midnight when three plainclothes police officers, who did not even identify themselves, broke down the door with guns drawn. Taylor’s boyfriend pulled a gun out of his pocket and shot one in the leg. But in the subsequent shootout he was shot back 32 times, six of which killed the girl.
This Friday, a jury acquitted the only one of the police officers who has faced the courts. The jury only needed three hours of deliberation, to the outrage of Taylor’s relatives and the family who lived behind her, whose apartment was entered by three of the bullets that agent Brett Hankison fired from outside.
Taylor’s murder will go unpunished because the case facing the jury was not an easy one, as Hankison did not fire any of the bullets that killed her. These came from the other two police officers, whom a grand jury decided not to judge, considering that they were responding to the attack on Taylor’s boyfriend, who was the first to shoot, having no idea who those individuals were. “Some armed guys broke down the door and shot my girlfriend!” he told the operator of the emergency services he called.
Without identifying yourself before
The agents had requested a type of court order that does not require identifying themselves or knocking on the door of the house before, in order to catch the suspects by surprise. However, during the investigation they insisted that they had identified themselves, despite the fact that none of the eleven witnesses interviewed by the newspaper ‘New York Times’ heard the cry of “Police!” that they said they had given. Once the perpetrators of the shooting were exonerated by the Grand Jury, there was only one recourse left to obtain the justice that the family sought. The third officer was charged with “unnecessarily endangering” Taylor’s neighbors, whom a bullet passed by inches. The prosecution, however, has not been able to prove that Hankison knew they were living behind the nurse when he went around the house and shot through the windows.
The accused agent declared that he had participated in a thousand raids without ever having fired a single shot, but this time he believed that “the criminals” were attacking their colleagues with a semi-automatic rifle. In reality, it was a free assumption because Taylor’s boyfriend only had a small pistol but that statement, in addition to serving as an alibi, justified before the jurors a response of “comradeship” that in any case has ended Taylor’s career. this officer. Nor are any of his other three companions already in the body.
Blow to Black Lives Matter
The family and the activists have promised to continue the fight until they at least achieve judicial changes that make sense of the absurd death of Taylor, who was not even the person the police were looking for. The search warrant was intended for her previous boyfriend of hers. It has been a bad week for the Black Lives Matter movement, which has lost an emblematic case and also the support of the Prime Minister.
In his recent State of the Union address, Joe Biden repudiated the slogan of this social movement calling for defunding the police. On the contrary, the US president promised to increase them to give agents “resources and training.”
#Breonna #Taylors #death #hands #police #unpunished