How about: they should be held responsible for the preventable death of this woman in a situation they directly and deliberately created? Is that not the problem?
I don't think anyone is demanding a first degree murder conviction here. They didn't walk in with the intent to kill her. But they sure as shit did kill her, and it's all their fault that it happened. Sounds like open and shut manslaughter to me.
Same thing happens in pretty much any large gathering of people: "I only signed off on blah, nobody told me foo and bar would happen". "We only did foo because someone signed off on blah, we had approval it's not our fault". And round and round we go pointing fingers at each other rather than improving the world for anyone.
I wonder how much this is due to sheer volume of warrants and policing actions?
But the court signed off on the warrant that law enforcement wanted. As I see it it's still the police holding the bag here.
I agree. But I still don't see how, if I ask you to let me commit a crime, and you say yes, that makes you more culpable than me. The word for that is "accessory", and it's by definition a lesser crime.
[0] https://www.boston25news.com/news/trending/charges-dropped-a...
Legally speaking, they are generally not responsible for creating the situation that led to their violation of Taylor's rights. The court has broad latitude to ignore events prior to any violation of rights, instead relying on whether the police felt at risk in that specific moment.
Because one of these is very easy to fix and would 100% mean Taylor would still be alive. The other would be super difficult to fix and who knows if it would have saved her life.
The answer is: both should be addressed.
The officers should be thoroughly investigated for this incident by an independent third party. If the facts support it they should be charged with the most advanced crime that the facts support (e.g. manslaughter).
Simultaneously, we should immediately discontinue and abandon no-knock warrants. If they're not abandoned entirely we should radically alter the burden of proof required to obtain one from probable cause to clear and convincing evidence.
But my understanding is that leading up to the death of Taylor no laws were broken.
In Kentucky, KRS 507.040 defines "Manslaughter in the second degree" (https://apps.legislature.ky.gov/law/statutes/statute.aspx?id...).
This is defined as:
> A person is guilty of manslaughter in the second degree when he wantonly causes the death of another person...
A "wanton" state of mind in KY is defined in KRS 501.020 (https://apps.legislature.ky.gov/law/statutes/statute.aspx?id...
> A person acts wantonly with respect to a result or to a circumstance described by a statute defining an offense when he is aware of and consciously disregards a substantial and unjustifiable risk that the result will occur or that the circumstance exists. The risk must be of such nature and degree that disregard thereof constitutes a gross deviation from the standard of conduct that a reasonable person would observe in the situation. A person who creates such a risk but is unaware thereof solely by reason of voluntary intoxication also acts wantonly with respect thereto.
Now, this quickly gets fact specific, but if the following acts are true:
- LMPD breached the house suddenly, and loudly
- LMPD breached the house late at night
- LMPD officers were wearing plain-clothes
- LMPD officers did not announce themselves (disputed)
I personally would find that the officers acted wantonly in a manner that would predictably created a serious risk of injury or death to themselves or bystanders. As such, given the statute and those 4 facts I would be willing to vote to convince on second-degree manslaughter in this case.
I'll note, again, that this is fact specific. The officers specifically claim to have loudly announced themselves. Walker and neighbors dispute that fact.
I think it's unreasonable to argue that police disregarded a substantial and unjustifiable risk when a Judge literally signed a piece of paper that said it was a justified risk.
And I don't think doing your job in a way that judges sign off 40,000 times a year is a "gross deviation from the standard of conduct".
If all no knock warrants are conducted that way, then I would indeed say that they are all wanton acts.
I don't care if they were following orders, or had permission from the state. Crime is still crime, and getting your boss to tell you to commit a crime is still a crime. Even if your boss wears blue.
Note also you've shifted the law slightly by saying executing the no-knock warrant how it's typicality done cannot be a gross deviation of standard conduct. Yet that's not what the law says.
The law does not say: "...disregard thereof constitutes a gross deviation from the standard of conduct that a police officer conducting a no-knock warrant would observe".
It says "...disregard thereof constitutes a gross deviation from the standard of conduct that a reasonable person would observe in the situation".
So let me ask you this: if you went down to Kentucky, and loudly broke into a house in the middle of the night" do you think it's likely that someone (yourself or the people in the house) could come to harm from this?
I think no-knock warrants are typically conducted by uniformed officers who loudly declare that they are the police, That's a very different fact pattern than what I said would merit manslaughter.
Each of these decisions trades some risk of death and injury for an increased likelihood that the police officers will find drugs.
I don't think this is a good trade-off, I don't think any amount of drugs you can flush down a toilet in a minute is worth the loss of life or violation of individual rights that a no knock warrant entails.
> So let me ask you this: if you went down to Kentucky, and loudly broke into a house in the middle of the night" do you think it's likely that someone (yourself or the people in the house) could come to harm from this?
Likely, no, possible yes.
I'd argue that it's not likely also, but I would say it is substantial, which is sufficient under the law.
I understand the reasoning provided. I think it wantonly risks death for unjustifiable reasons. They can provide their justifications, but to me (were I sitting on a jury) I would think an objective reasonable person would not agree with them.
It sounds like we're mostly in agreement on their actions creating a circumstance where the death could occur. I think at this point maybe the only difference between us is whether that risk is "justifiable" as described in the statute.
I think it is not and (again, given the specific facts I proposed which would have to be proven at trial) I would find them guilty of manslaughter.
But I guess time will tell if they get charged and convicted.
You and I probably have disagreements about how the current system values a human life relative to their other goals. I have no problem viewing a police department (or many police departments) systematically acting in a wanton manner. That doesn't excuse the individuals that carry out the actions.
For the same reason "I was just following orders" is not a defense. Breaking the law is breaking the law—even if your bosses order it and other people are doing it.
Again, I also do not believe that most PDs carry out no-knock warrants with these facts. I suspect most PDs during a no-knock warrant will still use uniformed police officers and announce themselves as police.
I don't think "I was just following orders" is a defense against breaking the law. But I think arguing that something is a common practice throughout the U.S. is a defense against the act showing a willful or depraved indifference to human life.
Basically I don't believe in the death penalty. But I also don't think the doctor who administers the lethal injection for the state should be convicted of manslaughter if they happen to kill an innocent person. (I also think the death penalty kills more innocent people per execution, than execution of warrants).
> I suspect most PDs during a no-knock warrant will still use uniformed police officers
Definitely agree here. But plainclothes warrant execution has been become increasingly common over the last decades. The no-knocks, are getting more no-knockier.
- People in plain clothes
- Knock down a door to an apartment
- In a country where people legally own guns
- In a country where "If they (robbers/burglars) come for me, they will get shot" is a thing
how is it an impossible standard to expect that someone will shoot at them for essentially being burglars?
There is nothing impossible about banning no-knock warrants so this situation can't happen.
How about: If you do something that could be met with justified self defense and you encounter that self defense your first instinct as police should be to retreat and clarify the situation?
Why is it reasonable to have the first instinct to shoot back?
I mean, there weren't any criminals here at all, but let's pretend they were dealing out of the apartment, as the reporting has suggested was the impetus. How many escaped drug dealers are worth one Breonna Taylor?
How many escaped drug dealers are worth one Breonna Taylor, depends completely on how violet the drug dealer is. Non-violent drug dealers, there isn't a number. But as the drug dealer gets more violent it requires fewer.
Exactly. But you're still evading by hiding behind a TV Crime Drama trope. How many dealers are "violent"? Have you researched that? While there is violence in the drug trade, as there pretty much has to be in any black market, there is almost none at the level of individual sales. Needless to say it's not a good business model to go around killing people in front of your customers.
I mean, the evidence in question (that got this woman killed!) is that a known dealer apparently walked out of the apartment. With a FedEx box. Do we really want to be shooting people for carrying boxes?
The idea of street dealers being dangerous is largely a fiction invented by society. And we're killing innocent people to perpetuate it.
There's books written about this (Outliers?)
I would imagine dealers are 0.1-1% of the population (say .3%) and the FBI says roughly 13% of homicides are gang related which is probably a rough proxy for the number of drug dealer related homicides.
This would put dealers as having a homicide rate approximately 40x the base rate. This seems right to me.
To be fair, have to measure folks in the same socioeconomic class and geography but not in gangs and compare?
In general I do think there are many situations where police should not automatically return fire when fired upon. Not all situations – but many situations.
Also, I’m not obsessed with making all criminal acts impossible or making sure that there are never any loopholes or ways for criminals to get away with something.
First of all, that’s an impossible standard to meet even if you put no limits at all on police action. Crime happens regardless and criminals get away with it. (Which is not intended to be defeatist hyper-cynicism. My intention here is to say that perfection in terms of solving crimes is an impossible standard even if you don’t give a fuck about human rights and dignity. You have to measure differently.)
Second, policing that respects human dignity and reduces overall harm (as opposed to being fixated on this one possibility of some criminal getting away with it) will sometimes lead to criminals getting away with it and that’s a trade-off I’m more than willing to accept.
I would be much more keen on talking about trade-offs, otherwise you always run into the trap of running into a situation where a policy could possibly in some way be abused by criminals and as soon as that happens this policy is automatically no good anymore. That seems like dangerous dead-end thinking to me. You always run into stop signs.
Loopholes are a valid argument against a policy, however they are not the final argument against a policy. Put them on the con-side and keep on thinking about it in terms of trade-offs.
How is that an impossible standard? Holding your fire and retreating is certainly an option. It carries more risk, but if you're going to dress in plain clothes and serve a no-knock warrant, that's a risk you must accept up-front.
The existence of no-knock warrants is also to blame, of course; banning them entirely would likely have prevented this.
And yet they managed to not return fire all day, until they decided to literally invade an apartment.
If my convenience store stickup goes sideways and the clerk gets shot I'm responsible. Cops should be held to the same standards as normal people.
We should also get rid of no-knocks but that's just whacking a particular mole. The root cause of the problems America has been having with police is that normal people do not get the same treatment under the law that police do.
That's very hard to answer because the cops have censored or lied about most of the report, as well as making claims about knocking and introducing themselves -- holding a no-knock warrant -- which is apparently disputed by witnesses.
But then again I don't think it's very helpful to try to identify the one and only Bad Guy™.
Yes? I mean, no, they're not the only bad guy. There are other problems to address too and other ways to solve the abstract problem. But abstract solutions aren't the same thing as "justice", and these officers made the decision to engage in violence that killed an innocent woman. That's culpability, period.
Look: the whole reason we put guns into the hands of special people is that we trust them to keep us safe. And that trust should come with responsibility when they don't. The officer's judgement needs to be applied in circumstances like this, they aren't robots. If they felt, like you do, that the warrant was impossibly unsafe to serve, they should not have served the warrant. That's what the trust we place in them is supposed to be for.
And they didn't. Clearly they were wrong about the safety, but they thought it was safe, because they did it. And Breonna died. And that lapse in judgement needs to be addressed with justice.