We've devoted plenty of coverage here to the ongoing saga of the police shooting of Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky in 2020. Her death immediately became one of those flashpoints of "racial injustice" that led to riots in the streets and several police officers being shot. Taylor was portrayed as another innocent victim of a brutally oppressive criminal justice system where a young Black woman could be gunned down by the cops with no repercussions. Despite increasing evidence that the police probably acted appropriately, local prosecutors wound up bringing charges against four of the officers involved in the incident, including felony counts that could potentially lead to lengthy prison terms. But this week, this sad tale drew much closer to a finish when a federal judge threw out the last of the felony charges against the officers, leaving only a couple of procedural misdemeanor charges in place. The court determined that it was Taylor's boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, who was responsible for Taylor being shot. (CBS News)

A federal judge has thrown out major felony charges against two former Louisville officers accused of falsifying a warrant that led police to Breonna Taylor's door before they fatally shot her.

U.S. District Judge Charles Simpson's ruling declared that the actions of Taylor's boyfriend, who fired a shot at police the night of the raid, were the legal cause of her death, not a bad warrant.

Federal charges against former Louisville Police Detective Joshua Jaynes and former Sgt. Kyle Meany were announced by U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland in 2022 during a high-profile visit to Louisville.

This circus was elevated to the federal level a couple of years ago when Merrick Garland made a big show out of going down to Louisville to announce federal hate crime charges against some of the officers. Those felony counts could have resulted in life sentences. Now the only charges remaining involve officers making false statements while obtaining a search warrant for Taylor's apartment. It sounds as if they did rush the warrant process a bit, so misdemeanor charges may still be appropriate, but that was never what led to Breonna Taylor being shot. That's what has made this entire investigation so frustrating from the beginning.

Bear in mind that Taylor was never the target of the police investigation that was taking place. It was her drug-dealing boyfriend who was the target. Breonna Taylor simply became collateral damage in the drug wars, unfortunately. Let's also remember that all of this could have been easily avoided. Kenneth Walker had previously had run-ins with the police and he knew how the game was played. When the police showed up at Taylor's apartment, he could have quietly surrendered immediately and waited to speak to his attorney as he had done multiple times in the past.

Instead, Walker waited inside Taylor's darkened apartment with her. When the Louisville Police finally broke in the door, he responded by shooting at them out on the balcony, striking one officer in the leg. He would later attempt to claim that he was unaware that he was shooting at the police, despite the fact that they had been repeatedly announcing their presence and demanding entry. When they were fired upon, the Police returned fire, regrettably hitting Taylor instead of Walker in the low-light conditions. If they had just killed Walker, this entire story would have played out very differently.

Sadly, that's not how things played out and we all know what happened next. At this point, four long years have dragged on and the careers of many law enforcement professionals were effectively ruined as a result. None of this was ever going to bring back Breonna Taylor from the grave. Yet we can hopefully take some sense of comfort away from all this based on Judge Charles Simpson being able to pierce the fog of acrimony and unrest and point the finger of blame where it has belonged all along. It was Taylor's boyfriend who wound up getting her killed, not the Louisville PD.