In a surprising development, Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron has announced that on Wednesday he would release the recording from the grand jury proceedings that decided Breonna Taylor’s case.
The statement arrived after a member of the grand jury filed a motion calling for the disclosure of the jury’s records, accusing the attorney general of using jurors as a “shield to deflect accountability and responsibility.” The juror argued that the public deserved to know the “full story and absolute truth of how this matter was handled.”
In the days following the jury’s verdict—which did not indict the officers who fatally shot Taylor in her apartment—Cameron has failed to answer many of the outstanding questions in Taylor’s case.
The most glaring of these is whether the grand jury even got the opportunity to vote on potential homicide charges for the officers who killed Taylor, or if Cameron had already decided that those charges weren’t appropriate, given his belief that the officers were “justified” in firing those fatal shots, since they had allegedly been fired at first. (This particular detail—that Taylor’s boyfriend shot one of the offers that night—has been called into question by an official ballistics report.)
Taylor’s family had been calling for Cameron to release the grand jury records even before the juror’s motion, troubled by this same question. But up until now, Cameron has refused to make those records public because of the ongoing criminal case and FBI investigation into Taylor’s death.
“Did he present any evidence on Breonna Taylor’s behalf?” Benjamin Crump, an attorney representing Taylor’s family, said earlier this week. “Or did he make a unilateral decision to put his thumb on the scales of justice to help try to exonerate and justify the killing of Breonna Taylor by these police officers? If you want us to accept the results, then release the transcript.”
We’ll soon be able to see for ourselves.