LOUISVILLE, Ky. — The Police Merit Board met for a second time to hear testimonies as fired Louisville detective Joshua Jaynes fights to get his job back.
Jaynes wrote the search warrant that resulted in the police shooting of Breonna Taylor in March 2020. Interim chief Yvette Gentry fired Jaynes in January 2021, saying he violated LMPD's standard operating procedure by not filling out a required form and lying in the affidavit he submitted to obtain the warrant.
In an almost four hour testimony, Gentry said Tuesday that she was completely comfortable terminating Jaynes because he was untruthful, admitting to lying when he obtained the warrant for Taylor's home.
"But we have a woman in her house that — she certainly picked bad guys, she's not the first woman that did that — she was failed by those men and she was also failed by Detective Jaynes cheating the system with the desire to get in there and he used false information to get it and that to me was unacceptable," Gentry said.
Jaynes is accused of lying in the affidavit when he said he verified the packages to Taylor's home through a U.S. Postal Inspector. About one month after the deadly shooting, though, Jaynes said he verified that information through Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly instead.
"You can't cheat, you can't go apply for a no-knock warrant for a girl you said is not a suspect based on information that is untrue," Gentry said.
Jaynes' attorney Thomas Clay asked Gentry several times how Jaynes used information that was obtained by other officers, saying it was allowed under what is called the "Collective Knowledge Doctrine."
To defend that argument, they called on retired state trooper Alex Payne who helped lead training in the Department of Criminal Justice.
"He believed in good faith in what he put in this affidavit...because he got it from his supervisor," Payne said. "He believed in his supervisor, he got it from another sworn police officer. People in this profession do that all the time, they believe what they're told from their coworkers, from the people that they're out there working with, and especially from their supervisor."
There were a total of three witnesses the defense called on to testify, one of whom was Kelly Goodlett, a detective who worked closely with Jaynes when they were investigating Taylor's home.
Mayor Greg Fischer will testify Wednesday for the third day of the hearing.
In a statement, his spokesperson said, "It is important to the Mayor that the merit board process plays out properly."
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