I really don’t want to bore you or myself with some treatise on philosophy. But I just want to say that the strongest form of causality is expressed this way:
If the cause is present, the effect is invariably present;
if the cause is absent, the effect is invariably absent.
There are less rigid forms of causality. For example, it’s not true that throwing your remote control at your television will always break your television, but if that’s how you broke your television then that’s not much comfort.
I bring this up because a Ronald Reagan-appointed federal district judge from Kentucky just ruled that two cops who lied on the search warrant application for Breonna Taylor’s apartment did not cause her death. Judge Charles Ralph Simpson III, who is 79 years old, has been on the bench in western Kentucky since 1986, but he’s been serving part time on senior status since 2013.
As a refresher, Breonna was a 26 year old emergency room technician who spent the night of March 12-13, 2020 at home in her apartment watching movies with her boyfriend. Sometime after midnight, while they were in bed, three cops operating under the authority of a no-knock warrant burst in with a battering ram. They were looking for one of Breonna’s ex-boyfriends but her current boyfriend believed it was a home intrusion and fired at the cops, hitting one in the leg. The cops unloaded a fusillade in return, killing Breonna.
In the federal suit, the government accused “Joshua Jaynes, a former Louisville Police Department detective, and Kyle Meany, a former Louisville sergeant..of knowingly making false statements in their application to a judge for a ‘no knock’ warrant to search Taylor’s home.” This caused their colleagues to execute a bogus search warrant, which caused Breonna’s death.
Going back to the logic of cause and effect, we can see that the strongest form of causality is absent.
Why? Well, because it is not true that the execution of a bogus no-knock warrant will invariably result in the death of an innocent. Instead, we’re left with the other half. If you don’t issue a bogus warrant you will invariably avoid killing people while executing a search because the search will not happen.
Now let’s look at the judge’s logic.
U.S. District Judge Charles Simpson in Louisville agreed with Jaynes’ and Keany’s motion to dismiss that part of the indictment in an order issued on Thursday, writing that “the Court finds that the warrantless entry was not the actual cause of Taylor’s death.”
“Even if police had a valid warrant, the alleged post-midnight, busting in would have frightened K.W. who would have fired, prompting the lethal return fire from the officers,” the judge wrote, using Kenneth Walker’s initials.
What he’s saying is that there was no variability. Any search at the time of night, whether legal or illegal, would have caused Breonna’s death. But this does the opposite of what he thinks. Instead of weakening the logic of holding Jaynes and Meany responsible, it strengthens it. The judge is arguing that if the cause (a late night no-knock search) is present, the effect (Breonn’a death) is invariably present. And we already know that if no search had been conducted, then invariably Breonna would not have been killed that night by the Louisville police. If we accept these two prongs, then we have the strongest possible expression of causality and therefore the least rationale for avoiding responsibility for what happened.
All that’s really left to determine is who made the search possible. The warrant would not have been authorized if not for Jaynes and Meany making false representations to a judge. They caused the search, and according to the judge, that type of search invariably results in death. Case closed.
Of course, one defense is that they didn’t expect her to get killed, but the judge says it was logically impossible for her to survive. He said they didn’t cause her death because her death was inevitable, but the search wasn’t inevitable.
So, these lying cops have had their charges substantially reduced because a 79-year old Reagan-appointed judge from Kentucky can’t reason his way out of a paper bag.
