Kentucky
Feds preparing for trials in Breonna Taylor police killing
LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) — Lawyers are set to discuss the federal case against a former Kentucky police officer who fired blindly into Breonna Taylor’s apartment on the night of the deadly raid that left her dead.
It will be the second attempt by prosecutors to convict Brett Hankison for his actions on the night Taylor, a 26-year-old Black woman, was shot to death by police. Attorneys will meet to discuss the case at a status conference in a Louisville federal courtroom Wednesday.
Hankison was indicted by the U.S. Justice Department last year along with three other officers, one of whom has pleaded guilty to helping falsify the warrant used to enter Taylor’s apartment on March 13, 2020. Taylor was killed in her hallway after officers broke down the door and Taylor’s boyfriend fired a shot that struck a police sergeant.
Taylor’s killing along with George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minnesota police in 2020 ignited protests that summer around the country over racial injustice. U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland announced the federal indictments in the Taylor case in August, remarking that Taylor “should be alive today.”
Hankison is the only officer who fired shots during the raid who has been charged in any court. Prosecutors determined that two other officers who fired and struck Taylor were justified in shooting back after Taylor’s boyfriend fired at them.
Hankison, 46, was acquitted in Former detective Joshua Jaynes and former Sgt. Kyle Meany March of charges brought by state prosecutors for endangering Taylor’s next-door neighbors with shots he fired into Taylor’s apartment that went through her walls. Hankison retreated from the open doorway and fired 10 bullets into a sliding door and window on the side of Taylor’s apartment. The more recent federal charges accuse him of endangering neighbors along with Taylor and her boyfriend.
Hankison’s trial is set for Aug. 21 in Louisville before U.S. District Judge Rebecca Jennings Grady. He faces a maximum sentence of life in prison if convicted.
Another former officer, Kelly Goodlett, has already pleaded guilty to a federal charge, and is expected to testify in the cases against two more officers who were involved in crafting the Taylor warrant. Former detective Joshua Jaynes and former Sgt. Kyle Meany are charged with conspiring to deprive Taylor of her civil rights. Jaynes and Meany are set to be tried together on Oct. 25.
Goodlett’s guilty plea was moved from last year to Dec. 13, presumably after Jaynes and Meany’s cases are finished.
New York
Judge to Trump: Too late to offer DNA to rebut rape claim
NEW YORK (AP) — Former President Donald Trump missed his chance to use his DNA to try to prove he didn’t rape a longtime magazine advice columnist, a federal judge said Wednesday, clearing away a potential roadblock to an April trial.
Judge Lewis A. Kaplan rejected the 11th-hour offer by Trump’s legal team to provide a DNA sample to rebut claims E. Jean Carroll first made publicly in a 2019 book.
Kaplan said that lawyers for Trump and Carroll had over three years to make DNA an issue in the case and that both chose not to do so.
He said it would almost surely delay the trial scheduled to start April 25 to reopen the DNA issue four months after the deadline passed to litigate concerns over trial evidence and just weeks before trial.
Trump’s lawyers did not immediately comment on Kaplan’s ruling. Carroll’s attorney, Roberta Kaplan, declined to comment.
Carroll’s lawyers have sought Trump’s DNA sample for three years to compare it with stains found on the dress Carroll wore the day she says Trump raped her in an upscale Manhattan department store dressing room in late 1995 or early 1996. An analysis of DNA on the dress concluded it did contain traces of an unknown man’s DNA.
Trump has denied knowing Carroll and said repeatedly, and sometimes angrily, that he never raped Carroll and that she was making the claim to stoke sales of her book.
After refusing to provide Trump’s DNA sample, his lawyers recently switched tactics, saying they would provide his DNA if Carroll’s lawyers turned over the full DNA report on the dress.
Kaplan wrote in an order that Trump had provided no persuasive reason to relieve him of the consequences of his failure to seek the full DNA report in a timely fashion.
And the judge noted that the report did not find evidence of sperm cells and that reopening the dispute would raise a “complicated new subject into this case that both sides elected not to pursue over a period of years.”
He said that a positive match of Trump’s DNA to that on the dress would prove only that there had been an encounter between Trump and Carroll on a day when she wore the dress, but that it would not prove or disprove that a rape occurred and might prove entirely inconclusive.
Kaplan added: “His conditional invitation to open a door that he kept closed for years threatens to change the nature of a trial for which both parties now have been preparing for years. Whether Mr. Trump’s application is intended for a dilatory purpose or not, the potential prejudice to Ms. Carroll is apparent.”
The Associated Press typically does not name people who say they have been sexually assaulted unless they come forward publicly, as Carroll has done.
West Virginia
Man charged with killing teen boy in 1985
KINGWOOD, W.Va. (AP) — Police have made an arrest in the cold case slaying of a 13-year-old West Virginia boy.
David Monroe Adams, 56, was charged with second-degree murder in the death of Jerimiah “Jerry” Matthew Watkins, whose body was found in a shallow hole near railroad tracks on Nov. 12, 1985, in Terra Alta, news outlets reported, citing a statement Tuesday from the Preston County Sheriff’s Office. Adams was 18 and lived in Terra Alta at the time of the slaying.
The sheriff’s office began reviewing the case earlier this month and found some inconsistent statements Adams had reportedly made at the time of the slaying, the statement said
“As part of renewing the investigation, law enforcement conducted multiple interviews with Mr. Adams and he eventually confessed that an argument that started over a stolen bicycle” resulted in the teen’s death.
An autopsy revealed Watkins had suffered a brain bleed from an apparent blow to the head, and the cause of death was ruled as a stab wound, deputies said.
Adams is being held at North Central Regional Jail. Online jail records don’t indicate whether he has an attorney.
