On the day before police officers shot and killed Breonna Taylor in her apartment in Louisville, Ky., a detective tried to persuade a judge that a former boyfriend of Ms. Taylor’s could be using her home to stash money and drugs.
The detective, Joshua Jaynes, said the former boyfriend had been having packages sent to Ms. Taylor’s apartment, and he even claimed to have proof: a postal inspector who had confirmed the shipments. Mr. Jaynes outlined all this in an affidavit and asked a judge for a no-knock warrant so that officers could barge into Ms. Taylor’s home late at night before drug dealers had a chance to flush evidence or flee. The warrant was approved by the judge.
Federal prosecutors have now found out that Detective Jaynes lied to them. It was never clear whether the former boyfriend was receiving packages at Ms. Taylor’s home. Prosecutors also stated that Mr. Jaynes never confirmed such a thing with any postal inspector. As outrage over Ms. Taylor’s death grew, prosecutors said in new criminal charges filed in federal court, Mr. Jaynes met with another detective in his garage and agreed on a story to tell the F.B.I. They and their colleagues covered up the misleading and false statements made by police to justify the raid.
Amid protests over Ms. Taylor’s killing, much of the attention has focused on whether the two officers who shot her would be charged. The Justice Department focused its attention on the officers who obtained her search warrant. This highlighted the problems that can arise when judges authorize searches based on facts that the police may have exaggerated, or even concocted.
“It happens far more often than people think,” said Joseph C. Patituce, a defense lawyer and former prosecutor in Ohio. “We are talking about a document that allows police to come into the homes of people, oftentimes minorities, at all times of night and day.”
Ms. Taylor is not the first to die in a law enforcement mission authorized on what prosecutors called police misstatements.
In Houston, prosecutors accused a police officer of falsely claiming that an informant had purchased heroin from a home in order to obtain a search warrant in 2019; officers killed two people who lived there during a shootout when they tried to execute the warrant, and only after that did the police chief at the time, Art Acevedo, say there were “material untruths or lies” in an affidavit for the warrant that led to the raid. The case is still pending and the officer pleaded not guilty.
After an officer had lied in a search warrant form about a informant purchasing drugs from Kathryn Johnston’s home, Atlanta police officers entered the home and fatally shot Kathryn Johnston (92 years old).
And in Baltimore, a federal judge sentenced a detective to two and a half years in prison last month after prosecutors said he had lied in a search warrant affidavit about finding drugs in a man’s truck in order to justify a search of the man’s motel room.
Judges often rely only on the sworn narrative of officers applying for warrants. This means that the police can perform potentially dangerous searches targeting innocents before their affidavits have ever been challenged.
The Supreme Court ruled that any evidence found in court cannot be admitted if police include false statements in search warrants affidavits when there is insufficient cause. False statements are often discovered when arrests are made and defense lawyers challenge search warrants in Court.
Legal analysts suggest that some deficient affidavits might not be scrutinized closely as defendants have pled guilty for other reasons.
Thomas Clay, a Louisville lawyer who is connected to the Breonna-Taylor case, understands the issue from both ends.
David Ward, a colleague of Mr. Clay, was once Susan Jean King’s representative. He was an amputee with one leg, and a small build, who was accused in the fatal shooting of her ex-boyfriend at her home, and then tossing his body into a river.
“This was his theory,” Mr. Ward said of the detective who took on the investigation as a cold case some eight years after the killing. “It was physically impossible for her to commit the homicide, drag his body out of her home and into her nonexistent car, and then take this large, 189-pound man and toss his body over a bridge and into the Kentucky River.”
Ms. King’s lawyers claimed that the detective falsely implied in at least one of the search warrant affidavits that a .22-caliber bullet found in the floor of Ms. King’s home was one of the rounds that killed the man.
But it had already been established that the man died of .22-caliber bullets that lodged in his head without exiting, Ms. King’s lawyers noted, and they argued that the detective’s assertion was implausible. A judge agreed and said that the detective had not included exculpatory evidence from his search order affidavits.
Nonetheless, Ms. King entered an Alford plea to second-degree manslaughter — in which she pleaded guilty while maintaining her innocence — and was serving more than five years in prison when another man admitted to the killing. She was ultimately exonerated.
In 2020, the state settled with Ms. King for $750,000 to settle malicious prosecution. The detective, who was already retired from the force, denied any wrongdoing through his lawyer at the time.
Now, Mr. Clay is representing Mr. Jaynes, the detective accused of lying to obtain the search warrant for Ms. Taylor’s home.
“Search warrants are always fair game to be scrutinized and they should be scrutinized,” Mr. Clay said, though he declined to discuss Mr. Jaynes’s case.
Mr. Jaynes has pleaded not guilty on Thursday to the federal charges. He said that he was relying partly on information from another officer when the affidavit was prepared.
False information by officers when preparing search warrant warrant affidavits can be used to shorten the process, Mr. Clay stated. This is because they believe they know the outcome of a case, but don’t have enough evidence to support it.
“The most extreme example is when they are just dishonest, even though they are under oath,” Mr. Clay said.
Former Boston police commissioner Ed Davis stated that lying on a warrant could lead to severe consequences.
“It’s tragic when you see police falsify information to obtain a search warrant, and it is also dumb,” Mr. Davis said. “Every one of those search warrants can turn into a disaster.”
In Ms. Taylor’s case, the prosecutors said that another detective, Kelly Goodlett, whom the department moved to fire on Thursday, had also added misleading information to the affidavit, saying that Ms. Taylor’s former boyfriend had recently used her address as his “current home address.” Prosecutors charged Detective Goodlett with conspiring with Mr. Jaynes to falsify the warrant.
Jaynes admitted that he didn’t verify the information regarding the packages with a postal inspector. Jaynes claimed he was told about the packages by a sergeant and that it was sufficient to back up his claims in an affidavit.
“I had no reason to lie in this case,” he told a police board in Louisville that was considering his firing last year.
In the federal indictment against Mr. Jaynes, however, prosecutors charged that this claim, too, was false, and that the sergeant had actually told Mr. Jaynes twice that he did not know about any packages being sent to Ms. Taylor’s home for her former boyfriend.
The judge who signed off on the warrant for Ms. Taylor’s apartment, Judge Mary Shaw, declined to comment through an assistant on Friday, noting that she could be called to testify in the criminal case against the officers. Judge Shaw is up for reelection in November. The Louisville Courier Journal reported that she was not one of 17 Jefferson Circuit Court judges who will be challenged for her seat.
Susan C. BeachyContributed research
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