Breonna Taylor wasn't really accused of doing anything wrong. Neither was her boyfriend, whose home she was at on the final night of her life. All she'd done wrong was having dated the wrong guy for a while.

Police reportedly lied to get the warrant in the first place. So far as I can tell, there was no reason to believe Taylor was knee-deep in the drug trade herself. What's more, law enforcement knew she wasn't with that wrong guy anymore as they showed up at the home of her new boyfriend.

And that new boyfriend is a gun owner.

When armed people suddenly busted into his home, he did what any of us would have done. He fought back.

Breonna Taylor was killed in the gunfight that followed.

Now, a judge says it wasn't really the cops' fault, but the boyfriend's.

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. Garland accused Jaynes and Meany, who were not present at the raid, of knowing they had falsified part of the warrant and put Taylor in a dangerous situation by sending armed officers to her apartment.

But Simpson wrote in the Tuesday ruling that "there is no direct link between the warrantless entry and Taylor's death." Simpson's ruling effectively reduced the civil rights violation charges against Jaynes and Meany, which had carried a maximum sentence of life in prison, to misdemeanors.

I pride myself on generally sharing my thoughts as they are. I've been referred to as "the attitude" here at Bearing Arms more than once because of the way I express those thoughts.

I cannot do that here. Why? Because we have rules against using the kind of language warranted to describe how absolutely awful and wrong this is.

Profanity isn't permitted.

Now, let's note that Simpson declined to dismiss conspiracy charges against the officers for making false statements that led to the raid. How is that not a case of Taylor's death leading? Because her boyfriend opened fire.

When police carrying a drug warrant broke down Taylor's door in March 2020, her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, fired a shot that struck an officer in the leg. Walker said he believed an intruder was bursting in. Officers returned fire, striking and killing Taylor, a 26-year-old Black woman, in her hallway.

Simpson concluded that Walker's "conduct became the proximate, or legal, cause of Taylor's death."

"While the indictment alleges that Jaynes and Meany set off a series of events that ended in Taylor's death, it also alleges that (Walker) disrupted those events when he decided to open fire" on the police, Simpson wrote.

Now, let's pause there for just a moment.

Someone busts into your home out of the blue and you're just supposed to let them? It's not like bad guys haven't counted on people doing just that by identifying themselves as police.

You have a right to defend your home, and while shooting at the police is generally contraindicated, that doesn't and shouldn't absolve the officers for lying to get a warrant--an illegal action in and of itself--nor negate the fact that an innocent woman was killed during the commission of a crime.

Generally, we charge people when their illegal acts result in people's death, and that's what happened here. Had there been no illegal warrant, there would have been no raid, and Walker wouldn't have believed his home was being invaded, thus no gunfight.

This isn't exactly convoluted here.

For gun owners, though, this is troubling.

What the judge is basically doing is saying we have no right to defend ourselves if we believe we are victims of a home invasion because it might be the police or something. He's putting a bit of hesitancy in every law-abiding citizen's mind that this might be the police. If one of our loved ones gets killed, it's our fault. He's saying that we have to just let a home invasion happen because it might be the cops executing a raid based on an illegally-obtained warrant and that those cops will basically walk even if my entire family gets killed, simply because I reacted as a sane and rational person would react.

Walker knew he wasn't doing anything illegal. He had no reason to believe the police would have probable cause to get a warrant to enter his home. He had even less reason to believe the door crashing down in the middle of the night was law enforcement, but the judge has said his girlfriend being gunned down was the result of him doing what any of us would have done.

No, I'm sorry, but this is wrong on every level.

In the afterlife, the judge will answer for his sins. I do not believe he'll be capable of answering for this one.