Justice Delayed is Justice Denied
(Disclaimer: La Tonique Media LLC does not represent any political ideology. While we do not espouse any political beliefs, we do seek to provide a balance perspective by incorporating voices from both sides of the political spectrum.)
By JTTC
On the 12th of March in Louisville Kentucky, police officers from the Louisville Metro Police Department obtained five search warrants in connection to a convicted felon suspected of supplying a local narcotics operation. One of these locations belonged to Breonna Taylor where she lived with her boyfriend Kenneth Walker III. Early in the morning of the 13th Officers Brett Hankison, Myles Cosgrove and Sergeant Jonathan Mattingly from the LMPD executed these warrants. There is significant dispute as to whether the police properly identified themselves before attempting to force their way into the apartment with a battering ram. Mr. Walker, under the impression that the apartment was being robbed, proceeded to arm himself with his registered firearm. The police officers attempted to enter the apartment and Sergeant Jonathan Mattingly was shot in the leg by Mr. Walker or possibly by another officer. In response, the trio of officers including Sgt. Mattingly responded with over two dozen rounds through a patio door and window with a significantly obscured line of sight; Ms. Taylor was struck by eight of these rounds and died in the hallway of her home. Mr. Walker would then call 911 still under the impression it was a burglary and then surrendered to police shortly after. The actual target of the warrants is arrested around the same time as the 911 call, ten miles away from the shooting. Mr. Walker is then arrested and charged for attempted murder for firing at the officers when they attempted to enter the home he shared with Ms. Taylor. No drugs, cash nor illegal firearms were retrieved in the raid. Most of us Americans who consider ourselves strong supporters of the Second Amendment would easily agree that Mr. Walker has a constitutional right to defend himself with his legally owned firearm from an unknown threat attempting to invade his domicile. Whether this is what happened largely hangs on if the police properly identified themselves. Regardless of which happened, what is true is that 26-year-old Breonna Taylor should not have been gunned down in the hallway of her home in the middle of the night.
Reactions to this incident have been volatile, but they weren’t initially. The nation was grappling with its lackluster response to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and the shooting largely stayed out of headline news. In the interim, Taylor’s family would go on to file a wrongful death lawsuit against the police department and the city, the top Louisville prosecutor would recuse himself from the investigation, and neighbors filed lawsuits against the officers involved as gunfire had been sprayed into their next-door apartment by police officers during the incident. It wasn’t until the George Floyd was choked to death by Derek Chauvin of the Minneapolis Police Department on the 25th of May that the spotlight came back to cases like Ms. Taylor’s. Three days later the 911 call by Mr. Walker is released. The next day massive protests are held throughout Louisville with seven more people being shot by various actors. Three months later the state legislature passed “Breonna’s Law” banning “no knock” warrants like those used in the slaying of Ms. Taylor, as well as firing one of the three officers involved in the incident. Over 6 months later on September 15th, the city of Louisville announced they would be paying $12 million to the family of Breonna Taylor, but also did not announce any charges on any of the officers involved. Around a week later a grand jury decided to not bring any homicide charges against any of the officers, instead electing to only issue one indictment for wanton endangerment to Brett Hankison for stray bullets that struck the neighboring apartment. There was no indictment issued to Myles Cosgrove who fired the fatal shot. The following days saw a resumption of protests with dozens of arrests and an incident where one Larynzo Johnson opened fire on police who suffered two non-life-threatening injuries. While the reaction to Ms. Taylor’s killing may have been less forceful initially, subsequent tensions have shown the ever-increasing impatience of the American people with the American justice system.
Breonna Taylor and her boyfriend Kenneth Walker III.
(Taylor Family)
Very few people would seriously contend that the American justice system has no flaws. For many, one of the largest laws is how the law is enforced, as well as how race influences this enforcement. As a Japanese American, my grandfather was imprisoned in the United States during WWII as a child exclusively due to his race. Ostensibly this was done because the U.S. was at war with Japan, but similar fates did not befall Italian or German Americans. Similarly, American police are ostensibly supposed to enforce the law equally on the people, regardless of race or any other similar circumstance. However, a large scale project to investigate police violence has found statistics that prove this to be sadly untrue. For example, black people are 3 times more likely to be killed by police than white people but are about 1.3 times more likely to be unarmed compared to white people. Not all police departments are equally culpable, with Buffalo NY having 0 people killed by police for three years in 2013-2016 compared to the 13 killed in Orlando, FL, despite having a higher Violent Crime Rate. A significant part of this is the power that police unions have over cities, leveraging contracts that allow them to limit the time that citizens can file complaints against an officer, allow the substitution of vacation days instead of suspension, and in many cases allow departments to erase disciplinary records of their own officers. A large problem with this is the way in which American law enforcement officers are protected from any legal liability, even when clearly caught using excessive force. The only exceptions are high profile cases that result in settlements but virtually no criminal charges, with everyone else receiving no redress, no justice. Even in the case of Breonna Taylor, the American justice system had to be essentially boxed into carrying out the justice it is supposed to dispense. It took over two months to drop the attempted murder charges on Mr. Walker and over six months to pay restitution to Ms. Taylor’s family and to promise police reforms. Currently, nobody has been charged in the slaying of Ms. Taylor, and until someone is, the justice that is due to Ms. Taylor continues to be delayed.
One of the key jobs of any nation state is to dispense justice to the people. Without justice, a nation state is no nation state at all. Without justice, a government is little more than a glorified protection racket. The principal of justice is the foundation for our Republic. In the United States, we care so deeply about this principle that we have enshrined it in our Constitution as Section 1 of Amendment XIV. For many Americans we know that this equal justice is not always forthcoming, especially to those of us who have been historically oppressed. We know that the progress towards this equal justice has been a long and very slow march to reach where we are now. Many Americans, especially those of us who don’t enjoy the same racial, social or economic privileges as others, have been told that we are being impatient or going about change wrong, that progress is slow, or that things are how they are. We have been told to be more considerate of how change may inconvenience others and we have been told to wait. For many of us, we have been waiting for this equal justice in the American justice system for years or even decades, for others they have been waiting for generations. For Ms. Taylor’s family, they have waited over six months and may never receive justice for the slaying of their loved one, only monetary compensation like Ms. Taylor was little more than an object. This is not justice, in the famous words of an American preacher, “justice too long delayed is justice denied”. When our justice is denied, so is the legitimacy of our constitutional republic. If, as Americans, we truly care about the integrity of our nation, we must stop delaying the administration of justice to the people, and we must stop sheltering those of us who abuse their positions to create more injustice.
JTTC is a political writer for La Tonique.
