LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) -- Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron said he will release the grand jury recordings from last week's deliberations in the Breonna Taylor case.
In a statement Monday night, Cameron said he would release the recordings Wednesday, complying with an order issued Monday by Jefferson Circuit Judge Ann Bailey Smith.
Smith ordered discovery items and the grand jury recordings be submitted to the court by Wednesday during former Louisville Metro Police Department Detective Brett Hankison's arraignment.
Taylor, a Black woman, was shot by white Louisville Metro Police officers in a raid on her apartment on March 13.
The grand jury last Wednesday indicted Hankison on three felony counts of wanton endangerment for shooting into a nearby apartment during the raid. Neither Hankison nor the two other officers who fired their weapons, Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly and Detective Myles Cosgrove, were indicted in Taylor's death. According to Cameron's office, those officers fired into Taylor's Springfield Drive apartment after Kenneth Walker, Taylor's boyfriend, fired first.
The attorney general's office said Monday that it has "no concerns with grand jurors sharing their thoughts on our presentation because we are confident in the case we presented. Once the public listens to the recording, they will see that over the course of two-and-a-half days, our team presented a thorough and complete case to the Grand Jury."
"Our prosecutors presented all of the evidence, even though the evidence supported that Sergeant Mattingly and Detective Cosgrove were justified in their use of force after having been fired upon by Kenneth Walker. For that reason, the only charge recommended was wanton endangerment," the attorney general's office said.
At the same time, Cameron's office said that his team still believes that releasing the information "could compromise the ongoing federal investigation and could have unintended consequences such as poisoning the jury pool."
Only hours earlier, a grand juror in the Taylor case had filed a motion in Jefferson Circuit Court asking a judge to release the evidence and make the proceedings public, in part, to protect jurors from backlash.
The motion claims that Cameron made "definitive comments" last week when he discussed his office's investigation into Taylor's shooting and the grand jury proceedings, which his staff oversaw.
And it notes that Cameron told reporters that the grand jury "agreed" that Mattingly and Cosgrove were "justified" in the shooting.
The grand juror also notes that Cameron "attempted to make it very clear that the grand jury alone made the decision on who and what to charge based solely on the evidence presented to them."
"The only exception to the responsibility he foisted upon the grand jurors was in his statement that they 'agreed' with his team's investigation that Mattingly and Cosgrove were justified in their actions," the juror's motion says.
And it suggests that Cameron, a Republican in his first term as the state's attorney general, is using the grand jurors "as a shield to deflect accountability and responsibility for these decisions."
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