As the old saying goes, this appears to be an open and shut case.
Or is it? One thing that has bothered me about this ruling is that many people seem to use the words "just" and "legal" more or less interchangeably. While there is some overlap, they are by no means the same thing.
Make no mistake- I am fully prepared to grant the legality of the grand jury's decision. What I challenge is the justice of it. That is a much higher and important question.
Letter From a Birmingham Jail
To whoever is reading this- please do not be cavalier about my argument. It is not mere semantics. There is a crucial distinction to be made between that which is right or moral and that which is legal, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. made this distinction in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail. Says King, "there are two types of laws: There are just laws and there are unjust laws." What is the difference between the two? King clarifies, saying "A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God."
In like fashion, moral philosophers Francis J. Beckwith and Gregory Koukl reason, " When reflecting on any law, it seems sensible to ask, It's legal, but is it moral? It's the law, but is the law good; is it just?"
I think it is fairly obvious that we all want just laws. But what should sober us- what should give us extreme pause in our current situation- is the reality that something can be completely legal and yet utterly wrong at the same time. Slavery was legal. Jim Crow was legal. Denying women the vote was legal. The Holocaust was legal. And all were morally wrong.
The question we must ask relates not to the legality of the Breonna Taylor ruling. Rather, we must focus on the justness (that is, the conformity to the moral laws of right and wrong) of the ruling.
The claim that I am going to make is that in light of the available evidence, the killing of Breonna Taylor is the unjust taking of an innocent human life, and to the extent that it exonerates her killers, the grand jury's finding was unjust.
The Devil is in the Details
Many people point to self-defense as the reason why the officers involved are innocent of murder or manslaughter. According to the New York Times, "Many legal experts said before the charges were announced that indictments for killing Ms. Taylor would be unlikely, given the state’s statute allowing citizens to use lethal force in self-defense." So, the argument goes that the police had a right to defend themselves and to use deadly force in the process.
The problem I have is that it seems obvious that they did much more than that. True, the first shot was fired by Ms. Taylor's boyfriend Kenneth Walker, who unwittingly fired a shot at what he apparently thought was an intruder. But in response to one shot, the officers responded with not one, not two, not ten, but thirty-two shots in response. What is more, the person they ended up killing is not even the person who shot at them, but rather an unarmed female.
Think about that for a second. The ratio is thirty-two to one.
Dictionary.com defines self-defense as "the act of defending one's person when physically attacked, as by countering blows or overcoming an assailant." But Ms. Taylor was not an assailant; she wasn't even armed. And while I will always grant (willingly) that police have every right to defend themselves, they also have a duty to protect the innocent. The onus is on them to make sure that when they discharge a weapon, they are sure, to the best of their ability, of who and what they are shooting at. Regardless of what activities Ms. Taylor and her boyfriend were suspected of engaging in, she was innocent until proven guilty, was entitled to the full protections of the law, and due process. She received none of these. That is morally wrong, and it should be illegal. If it is legal, then we need to change the laws until they accord with morality.
Just like we did with slavery.
Just like we did with Jim Crow.
Just like we did with women's suffrage.
Where do we go from here?
Where does all of this leave us? I'm not sure. I'm not a legal scholar. But I am a citizen. And I have a conscience. And my conscience is pained by the fact that an innocent woman was killed and effectively nothing is going to be done about it. I don't know if the men who killed Ms. Taylor are racists; I can't peer into their hearts. But I do know that they were gravely negligent. I also know that just as Abel's blood cried out for justice, so does Breonna Taylors's.
God help us all should we ignore it.
