When addressing the grand jury, Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron did not recommend murder charges for any of the officers involved in the death of Breonna Taylor. During an interview with WDRB-TV, he said that murder charges "were not appropriate" in this case.
“They’re an independent body. If they wanted to make an assessment about different charges, they could have done that,” he said.
“But our recommendation was that Mattingly and Cosgrove were justified in their acts and their conduct.”
Cameron had previously explained that officers Jonathan Mattingly and Myles Cosgrove were justified in firing shots at Breonna Taylor and her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, because Walker had fired at the officers first. However, the ballistics report found no conclusive evidence that the bullet that hit Mattingly in the thigh came from Walker's legal firearm. The state reports that the shot that hit Mattingly was "neither identified nor eliminated as having been fired" from Walker's weapon "due to the limited markings of comparative value."
The attorney general's comments also come aone day after one of the jurors filed a lawsuit demanding that the recorded proceedings of the grand jury be made public. The juror also asked that jurors be allowed to speak freely on the matter, so that the "truth may prevail." The lawsuit went on to claim that Cameron was using the jurors “as a shield to deflect accountability and responsibility for those decisions.”
"The full story and absolute truth of how this matter was handled from beginning to end is now an issue of great public interest and has become a large part of the discussion of public trust throughout the country,” the juror's attorney, Kevin Glasgow, wrote.
After the lawsuit was filed, a judge ruled that the state must release recordings of the grand jury proceedings. Recordings were set to be released on Wednesday. However, Cameron and company were granted a delay and will now release the recordings on Friday.
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