(CN) — Kentucky’s attorney general said late Monday that his office will comply with a judge’s order to release recordings of grand jury proceedings in the Breonna Taylor case.
Just hours after an anonymous juror disputed Attorney General Daniel Cameron’s public explanation of why no charges were filed directly related to the March 13 police killing of Taylor, his office agreed to release the grand jury’s deliberations.
The Republican attorney general also acknowledged that he never recommended homicide charges against the officers involved in a case that had fueled nationwide protests over the summer.
Instead, Cameron acknowledged for the first time on Monday he had recommended wanton endangerment charges.
Taylor, who was a 26-year-old Black woman, was shot and killed by officers in her apartment after police allegedly executed a no-knock search warrant related to a drug investigation involving her ex-boyfriend Kenneth Walker.
About a week after the city of Louisville reached a $12 million settlement with Taylor’s estate, Brett Hankinson on Sept. 23 was indicted on three counts of first-degree wanton endangerment.
The charges were not directly related to Taylor’s death, but to the shots he had fired into nearby apartments during the incident.
Hankinson was only one of the three police officers involved in the death of Taylor to be criminally charged after the grand jury presented its findings to the court.
The undisclosed juror on Monday accused Cameron of failing to accurately present the jury’s findings during his public explanation of the lack of charges for the other two officers.
The juror’s lawyer, Kevin Glogower, requested in a petition that all recordings and documents related to the grand jury proceedings be released.
"The grand juror that we represent felt compelled to take some sort of an action based upon the indictment that was rendered in the subsequent press conference and messages from the attorney general's office about how everything played out,” the juror’s attorney said in a press conference on Tuesday.
Glogower told reporters that Cameron has "yet to answer what was actually presented as far as the charges and the individual they were directed to,” stating that the public needs to know what other potential charges were explored during the jury’s two-day deliberation.
"Since the grand jury decision was announced, we've been saying that Daniel Cameron clearly failed to present a comprehensive case that supported justice for Breonna," Ben Crump, who represents Taylor’s family, reiterated in a news release on Tuesday.
During the hearing on Monday in which Hankinson pleaded not guilty, Jefferson Circuit Judge Ann Bailey Smith "ordered attorneys to file a recording of the grand jury proceedings" by Wednesday.
Cameron has previously refused to release transcripts of the jury’s deliberations, citing concerns that doing so is not the norm and could endanger investigation efforts.
But the attorney general made an about-face last night, deciding to heed Smith’s ruling and allow the recordings to be included in the court’s case file.
Even though Cameron contended in a statement that juries are meant to be “secretive bodies,” the attorney general said that "it's apparent that the public interest in this case isn't going to allow that to happen."
He said he would not object if members of the jury want to speak publicly.
"We have no concerns with grand jurors sharing their thoughts on our presentation because we are confident in the case we presented," Cameron said in a statement.
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