Kenneth Walker will be paid $2 million by City of Louisville

According to news source Associated Press, the city of Louisville, Ky. has agreed to pay $2 million to settle two lawsuits filed by the boyfriend of Breonna Taylor.
After Taylor’s boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, said he mistook police officers for intruders when they used a battering ram to gain entry to her apartment on March 13, 2020 and execute a search warrant, the state and federal lawsuits were settled more than two years later.
Mr. Walker hit an officer in the leg with a single shot. With a barrage of bullets that struck and killed Taylor, the officers returned. After she was killed by the police, people all over the country demanded that the department be held responsible.
Lawsuits filed in 2020 against the city and the officers involved claimed that Walker’s rights were violated when officers obtained and approved a “materially false” search warrant, neglected to announce before entering Taylor’s apartment, and used excessive and unreasonable force.
According to the AP, one of Walker’s attorneys, Steve Romines, said, “He will live with the effects of being put in harm’s way due to a falsified warrant, to being a victim of a hailstorm of gunfire, and to suffering the unimaginable and horrific death of Breonna Taylor.”
In March 2021, the charges of attempted murder of a police officer against Walker were dropped.
Three Louisville officers were charged by prosecutors from the U.S. Justice Department earlier this year with conspiring to falsify the Taylor warrant. One of the now-former officers, Kelly Goodlett, pleaded guilty and admitted to assisting in falsifying a link between Taylor and a wanted drug dealer.
A police officer “finally accepted some responsibility for the death of my girlfriend” in August, according to an article written by Walker in the Washington Post.
He wrote that the Louisville police tried to use him as a scapegoat to deflect blame, knowing all the problems that this failed raid would create. “It didn’t quite work.”
The trial of two other former officers involved in the warrant, Joshua Jaynes and Kyle Meany, is scheduled to take place in federal court next year.
Tamika Palmer, the mother of Taylor, received a $12 million settlement from the city of Louisville in September 2020.
A scholarship program for law students who want to practice civil rights law will be created from the settlement Walker received, according to his attorneys. The Georgetown Law School’s Center for Innovations in Community Safety will receive another portion, which focuses on police and community reform.