A POLICE detective has pleaded guilty to falsifying the search warrant that officers used to raid the home of paramedic Breonna Taylor, killing her.

Kelly Goodlett added a false line to the warrant after recognising police had insufficient evidence to raid the house in an investigation into illegal drug-dealing. No drugs were found.

Police burst into Taylor’s house on a “no-knock” warrant on March 13 2020, prompting her boyfriend to fire as he thought they were being robbed. Police responded with a hail of bullets — even into the neighbouring house — which killed the unarmed 26-year-old. 

Her extrajudicial killing, alongside the police murder of George Floyd on May 25 that year and the lethal lynching of jogger Ahmaud Arbery by three white men on February 23, sparked the global Black Lives Matter movement.

The officers who raided the flat and shot Taylor have never been charged, though one who fired into the house next door, Brett Hankison, was tried and acquitted. He now faces further charges.

But a new federal investigation charges the officers responsible for drawing up the warrant of lying by stating that a postal inspector had informed them an ex-boyfriend of Taylor’s whom they suspected of drug dealing, Jamarcus Glover, was receiving packages at the address.

The postal inspector later publicly denied this, after which Ms Goodlett met fellow officer Joshua Jaynes, who drew up the warrant, to “get on the same page” before Mr Jaynes spoke to investigators about the case. They decided to claim another officer had told them packages were being received there.

Mr Jaynes and Kyle Meany, the officer who signed the warrant, have been charged with criminal civil rights violations, and Ms Goodlett is expected to testify against them. 

US law professor Stephen Gard has claimed that lying in search warrants is widespread among US police forces. As long ago as 2008 he wrote a paper citing the frequency with which US officers lied to superiors in police reports and committed perjury in criminal trials.

The Kentucky Centre for Investigative Reporting looked into warrant procedures in Louisville after Taylor's death, and found that on over 70 per cent of warrants executed between January 2019 and September 2020, the judge’s signature was illegible, according to US journalist Hassan Kanu.