The Spanish Inquisition Gets Involved in the Breonna Taylor Case

Jamarcus Glover, Breonna Taylor's ex-boyfriend, appears to have been the primary target of the police investigation. Recall that Taylor's home was targeted because Taylor and Glover remained in touch and they even used to live together at that same address. There is good evidence that Glover was engaged in criminal enterprise in selling and distributing drugs, and he has already been convicted before. There is no good evidence that Taylor was in any way involved.

The attorney for Taylor's family has released a photo of a plea deal that he claims was offered to Jamarcus Glover in July, four months after Taylor was shot and killed. The prosecutor, Tom Wine, was the same one who charged Taylor's boyfriend with attempted murder for shooting at the plainclothes officers. Wine confirms the photo is legitimate, but claims it's a big misunderstanding and it was only supposed to be a draft document.

The terms of the plea deal is that Glover will admit that Taylor was involved in his drug dealing organization, among other terms. In exchange, his possible 10-year prison sentence would shrink to just probation.

This is a very weird plea bargain for a variety of reasons. First, Taylor is listed as one of multiple co-defendants. Wine claims that Taylor was never charged, and could not be charged posthumously, but offers no explanation as to how her name ended up in the paperwork besides claiming it was a draft document. Second, while I don't know the intricate practices of Jefferson County, offering only probation on a felony that could carry 10 years is a severe departure for someone who already has a related criminal history, and would only be plausibly be explained if there are serious evidentiary issues or other mitigating circumstances. Neither is apparent (doesn't mean it doesn't exist), and it's also impossible to tell how much weight the prosecutor is giving to each prong of the deal.

Taylor was killed in March, and this plea deal was reportedly offered in July. It's certainly possible that the draft paperwork was left in a prosecutor's folder by mistake, that certainly has happened to me with prosecutors I worked with. But it doesn't explain how Taylor's name was ever put there to begin with. Wine himself says that no grand jury ever convened to bring charges on her. So the only two explanations is either were so sure of her involvement based on the search warrant application that they started drafting guilty plea paperwork with her name on it, OR, they were pressuring Glover with prison time to provide a counter-narrative the department could use to address the embarrassment surrounding the entire affair.

Neither is very charitable, but the latter is downright evil and I can't think of alternative explanations. I gather law enforcement is trying to coerce Glover into “correcting” the popular narrative about Taylor in a misguided and myopic attempt to address the rioting in Louisville. It's still evil too, only marginally distinguished from using torture to elicit confessions of heresy.

This part of an ongoing bizarre effort to try and paint Breonna Taylor as a hardened accomplice directly pulling the levers in Glover’s criminal enterprise. This is largely based on the spurious links between Glover and Taylor, where he would either rent things in her name, or use her address to receive Amazon packages.

From experience, my baseline for criminals is that they are really dumb. The fact that the police vigorously and energetically searched Taylor's house top to bottom and found literally nothing is enough for me to have no doubt about her innocence.

I am not at all surprised that Glover, a drug dealer convicted multiple times, would use Breonna's address and phone number. I lose track of my clients all the time and that's often one of the biggest challenges at first. They don't pay phone bills, change their phone numbers constantly, and also move constantly. Notably they also get arrested constantly. I can point to a handful of current clients of mine who specifically instructed me to call a number or use an email that is specifically not theirs to get in touch with them.

Similarly, I am not surprised that Glover used Taylor's car to get around, or that he used her name to rent a car (no company would rent to a felon if they can help it). Neither is enough to establish a causal chain, and the police at this point had 4 years to pin the homicide on Taylor. It's not surprising that Taylor, who in contrast to Glover would not be getting arrested all the time, would also be the one "handling" money. She obviously knew his criminal ventures, no doubt, given that he often called her from jail. She probably knew that his money was not acquired legally, but that in itself is not a crime. The one errant reference to "trap house" is meaningless on its own, as are other references to handling money. I don't have anywhere near enough context to synthesize a coherent narrative of exactly how Taylor was involved in this drug enterprise, if at all. And the reporting outfit that has access to these leaked documents had an incentive to publish the most salacious excerpts. And reading between the lines, it's possible that a member of the police union is the one responsible for leaking the summary.

What I can pull from these revelations is that Glover and Taylor were very close. He used her car often (benign), and used her address to receive mail (benign), and phone number to be reached (benign). At worst, he asked her to "handle" his money. That can be looked at askew, but there's nothing illegal about it. I've seen other speculation that she was laundering his money, but umm, what does that mean exactly from an operational standpoint? Show me the business fronts and ledgers within her control and I'd start to believe it.

All this is still way besides the point. I'm someone who readily admits the cops had probable cause to get a search warrant on Taylor’s home (given the law as it is, which is extremely deferential to police), but I still find it a complete miscarriage because all the other prongs (plainclothes, middle of the night, firing blindly, etc.) remain unchanged. Whether or not she was the proper target of a criminal investigation is not dispositive on whether the incident is an outrageous example of police misconduct or not to me. It's just one of many layers of icing on top of an already hearty cake.