Breonna Taylor Case Shows Public Safety at Risk in Kentucky
New Information Uncovered
We just wrote an article on the manipulation of facts in the Breonna Taylor case, on September 23, and there is already new information out that casts even more doubt on the determination that Attorney General Daniel Cameron came to. I didn’t touch on everything I wanted to in our last article, pertaining to some of the comments made by A.G. Cameron, so let me bring up some of that now since it’s touched on in the article by VICE.com.
A.G. Muddies the Water, Hides Police Corruption
As we mentioned in our previous article, A.G. Cameron had no desire to find the officers guilty of anything. That matters since he is the one to shape the manner in which evidence is presented to the Grand Jury. In the video below, A.G. Cameron says at the 1:08 mark that “Kenneth Walker fired the shot that hit Sgt. Mattingly.” This is said definitively and is followed up by this comment at the 1:25 mark, “Ballistic report shows that the round that struck Sgt. Mattingly was fired from a 9mm handgun. The LMPD officers fired .40 caliber handguns.” According to VICE. com,
“But the initial ballistics report, which was conducted by Kentucky State Police and included in the investigative file provided to the attorney general’s office by the Louisville Metro Police Department, failed to prove that Walker fired the bullet that hit the officer, Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly.”
Only Witness Originally Said He Didn’t Hear Officers Identify Themselves
Now we are finding out that the one, the only person out of everyone who was at the complex and who heard the commotion, the only person to say he heard officers identify themselves, originally said, on March 21, they did NOT identify themselves. “No, nobody identified themselves.” Then on May 15, in another phone conversation with investigators, Mr. Sarpee said, that police said,“This is the cops.”
First, let me say that officers do not say, “this is the cops.” They say they are the police. That phrasing in itself is suspect but that aside, what changed after Mr. Sarpee made this statement on March 21 that now had him saying he had heard something? According to Vice.com,
“On May 15, Seeyle and Sarpee speak on the phone. During this conversation, Seeyle makes a reference to a previous conversation she says she had with Sarpee. But according to the investigative file reviewed by VICE News, there is no record of them speaking at any point prior to that phone conversation. Seelye proceeds to press Sarpee on two specific points: whether he knew they were police, and whether he heard the officers announce themselves.
During the May conversation, which spans almost 7 minutes, Sarpee shifts his account and says he heard police say “this is the cops,” corroborating the testimonies of the seven officers on scene.”
So not only does the investigator give away that there was at least one previous conversation that no one documented, but even in the documented conversation, she keeps pushing him until he starts changing his position. One has to wonder if the pressure to change his original statement actually started in that undocumented interview.
Evidence Bias by A.G.
A.G. Cameron showed extreme bias in which evidence he chose to accept as credible. There was only one person, in the whole apartment complex, who said that officers identified themselves, and that witness originally said they did not. It wasn’t until after investigators worked on him that he changed his story. But according to A.G. Cameron at the very beginning of the video, “Evidence shows that officers both knocked and announced their presence at the apartment…corroborated by an independent witness.”
When a witness does a complete 180 in their statement, that makes the witness highly questionable but it was the answer that A.G. Cameron wanted so he ran with it as if it was a firm fact. However, when the FBI was able to match ballistics regarding who fired the fatal shot, and the Kentucky State Police couldn’t, here’s what he had to say (see 4:08 mark), “KSP and FBI balistic analysis reached different conclusions creating a reasonable doubt in the evicence about who fired the fatal shot.”
The witness who flip-flopped is trusted completely by the A.G. once that witness is saying what the A.G. wants to hear. But the A.G. casts doubt on the FBI’s ballistics determination because the Kentucky State Police couldn’t make a determination. Just so you know, the FBI is considered the gold standard in forensics.
This is exactly what I was talking about in the previous article when I said the prosecution can present the case to the Grand Jury in a biased manner to get the results they want. A.G. Cameron has bent over backwards, doing everything he can to make sure the officers didn’t face any consequences for their excessive force that resulted in the murder of an innocent woman. When this is how your law enforcement and judicial systems work, public confidence is undermined, and public safety is at extreme risk.
Lies From the Beginning
One more piece of information has come out. According to WDRB.com,
“In the hours after Louisville police officers shot and killed Breonna Taylor, then-Chief Steve Conrad testified he was told by two of his commanders that Taylor had fired at officers as they raided her home and she was on the floor in a “prone position holding a rifle.”
“And she was the one directing the fire, you know, at them,” Conrad said in an interview with the department’s Public Integrity Unit on March 18, five days after the shooting.
He was also told that a man in the apartment at one point said “the woman was in fact the shooter.”
None of this was true. The lies started from the very beginning.