The Justice Department asked a federal judge on Friday to drop the remaining criminal charges against two Louisville, Ky., police officers involved in drafting the no-knock search warrant that led to the fatal shooting of Breonna Taylor in 2020.
The motion, filed in the Western District of Kentucky, asked the court to dismiss the charges “in the interest of justice.”
The death of Ms. Taylor, a 26-year-old Black medical worker, was one of the main drivers of wide-scale protests that erupted in 2020 over policing and racial injustice in the United States.
Attorney General Merrick B. Garland charged four members of the Louisville Metro Police in 2022, accusing them of taking actions that led to Ms. Taylor’s death during a botched search for a drug dealer she once dated. That included the two officers whose charged may now be dropped, Kyle Meany and Joshua Jaynes.
The Justice Department under President Trump has sought to rein in or abandon many civil rights cases begun under earlier administrations. But the case against the two officers had already been seriously weakened by a federal judge.
Last August, Judge Charles R. Simpson III of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Kentucky threw out the most serious charges against the two officers, including accusations that they had committed violations of federal civil rights laws.
In his ruling, the judge acknowledged that he was “troubled” by the officers’ potential falsification of the warrant, but said the government could not prove that their actions had directly led to Ms. Taylor’s death in a hail of police bullets.
He left in place several other lesser charges, including misdemeanor civil rights violations and charges the officers falsified records and conspired to conceal their actions.
“This move is indefensible and unsupported by the facts and the law,” said Kristen Clarke, who was the head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division when the case was brought, responding to Friday’s motion.
“It is especially callous that this comes as communities just marked the six-year anniversary of her tragic murder,” she added.
A Justice Department spokesman and lawyers for the officers did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Ms. Taylor was watching movies in the apartment she shared with her boyfriend shortly after midnight on March 13, 2020, when plainclothes officers battered down the door looking for illegal drugs. Ms. Taylor’s boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, believing the intruders were robbers, fired a single shot at them with his licensed handgun, and the unarmed Ms. Taylor died in the hail of return fire from the officers.
No drugs were found.
Glenn Thrush covers the Department of Justice for The Times and has also written about gun violence, civil rights and conditions in the country’s jails and prisons.
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