The Kentucky attorney general who tried to pull a fast one on the public when he let the cops who killed Breonna Taylor off the hook is now looking for his reward from the MAGA crowd: he wants to be governor of Kentucky.
Daniel Cameron yesterday filed the required paperwork to make his candidacy for governor official, the Associated Press reported. Kentucky will elect its next governor in 2023. Cameron, a Republican–and also somehow still allowed to be a member of a Divine Nine fraternity despite his clear disdain for helping Black folks in his state receiving justice and due process under the law–became Kentucky’s first Black attorney general in 2019.
It didn’t take him long to show that the red of a MAGA hat meant much more to him than protecting Black folks from police brutality and violence. In March 2020, Taylor, a 26-year-old emergency medical technician in Louisville was killed after police burst into her apartment under a no-knock warrant. Taylor’s boyfriend, who was licensed to carry a firearm, opened fire believing the cops were intruders and the cops returned fire with dozens of shots.
Cameron convened a grand jury to investigate possible charges against the officers–who were fired by the Louisville Police Department–but several of the grand jurors later said the whole proceeding was a sham.
During a 2020 news conference to announce a grand jury’s findings, Cameron said jurors “agreed” that homicide charges were not warranted against the officers, because they were fired upon. That prompted three of the jurors to come forward and dispute Cameron’s account, arguing that Cameron’s staff limited their scope and did not give them an opportunity to consider homicide charges against the police in Taylor’s death. Last year, in an interview with the AP, Cameron said those jurors can speak for themselves, but he said the grand jury “ultimately” decided the charges in the case.
Although demonstrators had gathered outside Cameron’s home to demand justice for Taylor, no officers were ever charged for their roles in her death.
Cameron is also staunchly anti-choice, having fought all the way to the Supreme Court to gain the right to enforce a Kentucky law that restricted abortion rights after that law was struck down by lower court decisions. If anyone’s counting, that’s the same Supreme Court currently poised to wipe out the right to an abortion all over the country–a position that the vast majority of Americans, and especially Black folk, disagree with.
