Sadly, no surprises: Justice for Breonna delayed, deferred and mostly denied.
To legal experts, the Jefferson County grand jury’s decision to indict only one officer in the Breonna Taylor — not for killing her, mind you, but for shooting into other people’s apartments — did not come as a shock.
“The findings were not surprising, and that’s a problem in itself,” said Cortney Lollar, a criminal law professor at the University of Kentucky College of Law. “It absolutely shows the problems with how the law itself has evolved.”
That evolution includes laws that justly condemn police officers for firing blindly into at least three other apartments the night of March 13, according to the grand jury indictment, but do not punish them for killing a woman in her own apartment. The police were there on a legal warrant and they fired in self-defense after Taylor’s boyfriend fired one shot at them, hitting an officer in the leg. That shot resulted in a hail of bullets through doors and walls.
That indictment, wanton endangerment, is only a Class D felony, punishable of up to one to five years in prison. And that’s only if Officer Brett Hankison, who’s already been fired by Louisville Metro Police (he’s appealing) and whose personnel file was full of tripwires, gets found guilty. A big if.
So once again, justice is delayed, deferred and mostly denied. The systems are irrevocably broken. The law is to blame. Police training, which appears to teach cops that every raid is like entering a war zone, is to blame. And while there are of course many good police officers, two new pieces of evidence came out just this week to show there is a fundamental problem in how many of them see the world.
One was a letter from Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly, who led the raid on March 13. He wrote an email to fellow officers on Tuesday saying that police “did the legal, moral and ethical thing that night.” He also called protesters “thugs,” and concluded: “It’s sad how the good guys are demonized, and criminals are canonized.” No remorse, no sorrow.
Then the Courier Journal published an email from a LMPD major back in August calling the protesters “punks” who “will be the ones washing our cars, cashing us out at the Walmart, or living in their parents’ basement playing COD for their entire life.”
There you have it. These officers refuse to see the humanity of Taylor or those who have marched on her behalf, along with all the other Black victims of police brutality. Are such officers unable to empathize before they join the force or does it happen once they’re there? That will be yet another problem to face, another systemic injustice to unravel.
Maybe at some point our society can admit that our laws and our policing are neither moral nor ethical when it comes to their treatment of Black Americans. How much more evidence do we need?
“I am perpetually optimistic that things like this will effect change, but it will take a lot of soul searching and thoughtfulness on the part of leaders in the state and the country to do some self-reflection,” Lollar said. “The possibility is there, the question is whether people will take advantage of it.”
This story was originally published September 23, 2020 at 3:12 PM.
