Breonna Taylor: The controversial sentence that ignites the racial debate in the USA

Breonna Taylor’s death didn’t garner much media attention in March. The case only gained notoriety after the massive anti-racism demonstrations that swept through the US after the former African-American guard George Floyd died asphyxiated under the knee of a policeman in May, in Minneapolis. But six months after her death in Louisville, Kentucky, after a confusing police procedure, the controversial sentence against the agents involved in the death of the 26-year-old paramedic ignited the debate again.

Taylor died shortly after midnight on March 13, after three policemen raided his apartment with a special search warrant that allowed them to enter the home without warning, as part of a drug investigation involving Taylor’s ex-boyfriend, Jamarcus Glover, a convicted drug dealer.

Glover included Taylor’s apartment as his address and used it to receive packages, authorities said. The African-American woman – who lived with her sister – had no criminal record and no drugs or money were recovered during the raid, according to the search warrant inventory document obtained by NBC News.

But the operation had a dramatic outcome. That night Taylor was in her bedroom watching a movie with her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker. Believing they were robbers, the man fired a “warning shot” to the front door that had been knocked down, striking Sergeant John Mattingly in the leg, according to police. Walker was licensed to carry firearms, NBC said. But officers claimed to have announced their presence before entering, a version confirmed by a witness, according to Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron.

After Walker’s shot, Officers John Mattingly, Brett Hankison and Myles Cosgrove returned fire with a total of 32 shots. Cameron reported that Taylor was shot six on the night of his death, but only one of them was fatal. All these details were known this Wednesday, within the framework of the pronouncement of a Kentucky investigative jury that limited itself to indicting, and indirectly, only one of the policemen involved in the shooting. Hankison was charged with endangering the lives of others, in this case three of the victim’s neighbors. But neither he nor the other two police officers who fired the shots that killed Taylor were charged with the murder of the nurse.

Hankison fired 10 bullets, some of which hit the apartment neighboring Taylor’s, “putting three people in grave danger of physical injury or death,” according to Cameron. Charges of dangerous conduct in the first degree are Class D, the lowest level of felony crimes in Kentucky, which could be punishable by between one and five years in prison, if convicted. Attorneys for Taylor’s family had requested at least wrongful death charges.

According to local media, Hankison appeared in a jail in the region and was later released after posting bail of US $ 15,000. a very low sum in relation to similar cases. Meanwhile, Mattingly and Cosgrove, who had been dismissed in June, were not charged with any charge, having, according to the prosecutor, acted in a state of self-defense.

“How ironic and typical it is that the only charges filed in this case were for shooting at a white neighbor’s apartment, while no charges were brought for the shooting in the black neighbor’s apartment or at Breonna’s residence.”, He said Ben crump, an attorney for Taylor’s family, who rejected the charges, saying it should have been an “aggravated murder.”

“This amounts to the most egregious disrespect for blacks, especially black women, killed by the police in the US, and it is indefensible, regardless of how Attorney General Daniel Cameron seeks to justify it,” Crump said Thursday to CNN.

For Dewey M. Clayton, Professor of Political Science at the University of Louisville, “there seems to be some troubling discrepancies in the case.” “I’m not saying there is racism in this particular sentence. However, there is racism in our criminal justice system: this country appears before a criminal justice system for the police, one for white Americans and one for African Americans ”, commented to Third.

“This result is a shame and an abdication of justice. Our criminal justice system is racist. Now is the time for a fundamental change “the senator tweeted Bernie Sanders, Former Democratic presidential candidate.

The attention on Cameron, the first Republican in 70 years to serve as Kentucky’s attorney general, has only increased in recent weeks after he spoke at the Republican National Convention, addressing Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden to say: “You can’t tell me how to vote for the color of my skin”. At a press conference on Wednesday, President Donald Trump called Cameron “a star” and he read the statement of the 34-year-old African-American prosecutor saying that “justice is not easy.”

A court decision that Breonna’s family does not understand. “Sister, a system you worked hard for failed you. They failed us as a family, ”Juniyah Palmer, Taylor’s sister, wrote on Instagram.