The Louisville Police Department has filed a lawsuit this week to block the release of records in the Breonna Taylor case.
The department is focusing their attention on the newspaper The Courier-Journal, who sued Louisville police in May for the immediate release of the department’s files on the fatal police shooting of Taylor on March 13.
“This charade of secrecy at LMPD must stop. The public deserves more; it deserves answers,” The Courier-Journal’s editor Richard Green said at the time.
“The Taylor case has drawn national scrutiny and with good reason. At this unsettled time, LMPD wants to keep private its finished investigation and pretend its work does not belong to the public and to taxpayers. We disagree, which is why we are taking our case directly to the court for a ruling.”
But the department’s new lawsuit claims that releasing the files would hurt an impartial investigation.
“Once the toothpaste is out of the tube, it will be impossible to put it back in,” the Jefferson County Attorney’s Office’s suit reads per the outlet. “To accept (The Courier Journal) position, one can only imagine the floodgates that will open if media outlets can insist on monitoring criminal investigations in ‘real’ time simply because they are curious about what investigators are learning from day to day. Or because media wishes to have video for its newscasts.”
But Green says the department is just stalling for time.
“LMPD took action,” said Michael Abate, an attorney for The Courier-Journal. “They fired an officer based on the results of this investigation. They’ve clearly completed that investigation. … They can’t hide behind the attorney general’s slow time frame for making a decision to prevent the release of public documents.”
It has been more than 100 days since police killed Taylor in her own home in Louisville, Kentucky. Last month, on June 5, she would have turned 27.
