Page 28 - Delaware Lawyer - Winter 2021

FEATURE
Tasha Stevens, Esq.
The Case
for Recording the Grand Jury Process
Delaware needs The death of 26-year-old Breonna Taylor took the world by storm. It was
to preserve records of proceedings to ensure justice
yet another case of a person of color losing her life at the hands of police officers under questionable circumstances.
26 DELAWARE LAWYER WINTER 2021
Shortly after midnight on March 13, 2020, Ms. Taylor was in her apartment in Louisville, KY with
her then-current boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, III, when three plain-clothes police officers entered to execute a No Knock Search Warrant as part of a drug investigation relating to her for- mer boyfriend, Jamarcus Glover.1 The public will either believe that the police knocked and announced themselves before using a battering ram to break down the apartment door to serve the No Knock Warrant or that they simply used the force to gain entry.2 At that time, Mr. Walker used his legal firearm to fire a warning shot at the intruders. The bullet struck Officer Johnathan Mattingly in the leg, resulting in the officers firing over 30 rounds into the home, six of which struck Ms. Taylor and resulted in her untimely death.3
The community demanded that the officers be criminally charged and held
accountable for Ms. Taylor’s death. However, for months, there was no re- sponse to her killing from the Kentucky District Attorney’s office.4 Calls for justice for Ms. Taylor were revived and strengthened in the wake of the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, MN on May 25, 2020. Mr. Floyd, an African American male, died in police custody after three police officers rested their full body weight on him in order to subdue him. His death was recorded and widely televised so that all could watch him beg and plead for his life and his deceased mother, expressing over and over that he could not breathe, for eight minutes and 46 seconds.5 His death was remi- niscent of Eric Garner, another African American male killed in police custody in New York six years ago when a New York Police Department officer, Daniel Pantaleo, placed him in an illegal choke- hold and ignored his repeated cries of, “I can’t breathe.”6