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Behind The Push To Release Breonna Taylor Grand Jury Recordings

TONYA MOSLEY, HOST:

Recordings from the grand jury proceedings in the Breonna Taylor case will be made public on Friday. Last week, the grand jury decided after more than two days behind closed doors not to charge the officers who raided Breonna Taylor's apartment with her death. It's highly unusual for recordings to be released, but one of the grand jurors filed a motion to make them public. That person has chosen to remain anonymous at this point, so we're joined now by Kevin Glogower, a Louisville attorney who's representing the grand juror.

Welcome.

KEVIN GLOGOWER: Good afternoon. Thanks for having me.

MOSLEY: What motivated your client to make this request?

GLOGOWER: The motivation for my client was kind of a dual conviction - a conviction of doing his appropriate service as a grand juror but also doing the right thing as a citizen in our community. Once the charges were released and certain statements were made about how things happened, there was some concern that maybe the full truth wasn't getting out to the public, so the individual wanted to explore their rights and ultimately decided to file the motion to get those rights declared by a court.

MOSLEY: So far, your client is anonymous. Do you expect them to speak out once the public has heard the recording?

GLOGOWER: Well, the recordings are subject to a lot of litigation that's evolving even as of today. There have been additional motions filed. But to answer your question, giving up anonymity is something that will be looked at and considered at different points during this process based on what's in the recordings and what rulings we may get on our motion as well.

MOSLEY: In a tweet today, Attorney General Daniel Cameron said he requested the delay because personal information like phone numbers and addresses of witnesses needs to be removed from more than the 20 hours of recordings. What's your read on the extension request? Are you concerned it could go beyond privacy?

GLOGOWER: To the extent it's about personal identifiers, I think it's appropriate. We certainly respect the rights of every individual in our community and their right to privacy. To the extent it would affect anything that's on the recordings from an evidentiary standpoint or the proceedings themselves outside of those identifiers, that would be a tremendous problem.

MOSLEY: Yeah. Cameron said in an interview yesterday that his office did not recommend charges for the two officers who fired into Breonna Taylor's home, killing her. But he also said that a grand jury is an independent body and, quote, "if they wanted to make an assessment about different charges, they could have done that." Did you feel your client had clear direction on the paths that they could take?

GLOGOWER: Well, that's a question that, I think, will be answered at a later date. But in response to the statement of the attorney general, that is - again, it's a correct statement of the law that they have the ability to inquire about additional charges. However, it doesn't tell you the rest of the law, which is that the prosecutor in charge acts essentially as a legal counsel to the grand jurors and would have to help them through that process.

And what we're hearing in these remarks are they're now admitting what they recommended and that they recommended no charges against the other two law enforcement officers. However, what we're not hearing is what charges were and were not presented to the grand jury. And we're not hearing whether or not they inquired about any additional charges and, if so, how that was handled by the attorney general's office. Hopefully, all that comes out in time.

MOSLEY: Are there other grand jury members you know about who have similar concerns who may also want to come forward?

GLOGOWER: At this time, we don't have any knowledge of any additional grand jurors wishing to come forward.

MOSLEY: What are you looking for when you finally get to hear these recordings?

GLOGOWER: We're looking for truth and transparency, and we're looking for accountability and responsibility to be in the places that it's supposed to be. This is the highest law enforcement office in our commonwealth, and they should take responsibility for whatever's happening. They should be accountable, and they should tell the whole truth to the community at large.

MOSLEY: Yes. This grand juror who filed this motion to make them public - do you know as well in your talking with this person what other concerns they have about all of this?

GLOGOWER: Again, the concern is just accountability, truth, transparency and public trust. If the process can't be trusted and when there are legitimate questions out there that the public can have answers to but they're not receiving, sometimes somebody has to act. And this individual felt compelled to do so based on what was put out there and their concerns that the whole narrative was not getting to the public, who's already embroiled in protests and unrest in general because of this case before the ruling came out from the grand jury and even more so now.

MOSLEY: That's Louisville attorney Kevin Glogower.

Thank you so much for your time.

GLOGOWER: Thank you. Have a great night. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.