A judge on Wednesday approved the Kentucky attorney general’s request to delay the release of a recording from the grand jury in the Breonna Taylor case.
Attorney General Daniel Cameron (R) originally said he would release the recording Wednesday but sought an extra week to redact personal information about the jurors. Jefferson Circuit Judge Ann Bailey Smith granted an extension until Friday, two days after the original Wednesday deadline, “in the interest of protection of witnesses, and in particular private citizens named in the recordings,” she said.
The recording is about 20 hours long, Cameron’s office has said. Bailey Smith ruled earlier this week that it must be released after one of the 13 grand jurors sued for the records to be made public and requested that jurors be free to speak on the matter so the “truth may prevail.”
Last week, the grand jury declined to issue murder charges against any of the police officers involved in the March 13 killing of Taylor, a 26-year-old Black EMT shot to death in her Louisville apartment during a botched narcotics investigation. The only officer charged with anything was Detective Brett Hankison, who’s been indicted on three counts of first-degree wanton endangerment related to gunshots that entered nearby apartments.
Cameron revealed after the charges came out that he didn’t even give the grand jury the option to consider murder charges, saying it was “not appropriate.”
The decision set off protests in Louisville and across the country. Taylor’s family slammed Cameron, who said last week that the two officers who shot Taylor were justified because her boyfriend fired at them first.
“It’s clear that that is the way they will always see us,” Taylor’s mother, Tamika Palmer, said in a statement last week after the grand jury decision came out. “I was reassured Wednesday of why I had no faith in the legal system, in the police, in the law. ... The system as a whole has failed her.”