Kentucky Authorities Offered Leniency to Breonna Taylor's Ex if He Would Implicate Her in Drug Crimes

(Rick Davis / SplashNews/Newscom)

They're trying to "paint a picture of her which was vastly different than the woman she truly was," says lawyer. Kentucky authorities' defense for fatally shooting Breonna Taylor in a late-night raid for nonexistent drugs and drug money has always turned on the idea that Taylor—a 26-year-old emergency room technician who lived with her sister—was part of her ex-boyfriend's alleged drug scheme. Now, new documents show how far they were willing to go to manufacture evidence for this narrative.

"On Tuesday, we were told Breonna Taylor's ex-boyfriend Jamarcus Glover was offered a plea deal, which would have required him to say that Taylor was part of his drug operation," Vice news correspondent Roberto Aram Ferdman noted yesterday, adding that "the family's attorney shared a picture of a plea deal that appears to show it is true."

To accept the deal, Glover would have had to sign a statement saying that Taylor was among several others who helped him in an "organized crime syndicate" as he "trafficked large amounts of Crack cocaine, methamphetamine, and opiates" in the Louisville area and sold it "from abandoned or vacant homes."

If he agreed, the Jefferson County Office of the Commonwealth's Attorney was willing to shrink his possible 10-year prison sentence to only probation.

Even if Taylor had been part of this supposed "crime syndicate," it wouldn't justify what police did here, of course. They were still trigger-happy goons who did a middle-of-the-night raid, without announcing themselves clearly, as part of an unwinnable but endlessly violent, discriminatory, and abusive war on drugs that makes everyone less safe and routinely leads to avoidable tragedies like these.

But their actions are all the more appalling when you consider the weakness of their evidence that anything illegal was at Taylor's house. In fact, they raided the home and killed Taylor as she had been disentangling herself from Glover, trying to move on from their relationship and whatever tangential involvement in his activities it may have brought.

But police and county authorities wouldn't let her. They were insistent on casting the net as wide as possible and taking Taylor down with Glover—at any cost, apparently. And now that Taylor can't defend herself, they're trying to manipulate the legal system to get Glover to go along with it.

The attempt shows "the lengths to which those within the police department and Commonwealth's Attorney went to after Breonna Taylor's killing to try and paint a picture of her which was vastly different than the woman she truly was," Taylor's lawyer, Sam Aguiar, said.

Glover didn't ultimately take the deal, offered to him in July, and rejects the idea that he is somehow responsible for Taylor's death. "The police are trying to make it out to be my fault and turning the whole community out here making it look like I brought this to Breonna's door," he told The Courier Journal. "There was nothing never there or anything ever there, and at the end of the day, they went about it the wrong way and lied on that search warrant and shot that girl out there," he said.