A federal judge has dismissed serious charges against two former Louisville, Kentucky, officers who were accused of falsifying an arrest warrant that led police to Breonna Taylor’s doorstep and fatally shooting her.

U.S. District Judge Charles Simpson ruled that the actions of Taylor’s boyfriend, who shot at police the night of the raid, were the legal cause of her death and not a bad warrant.

Federal charges against former police detective Joshua Jaynes and former Sgt Kyle Meany were announced in 2022 by Merrick Garland during a high-profile visit to Louisville. The U.S. attorney general accused Jaynes and Meany, who were not present during the raid, of knowingly forging a portion of the warrant and putting Taylor in a dangerous situation by sending armed officers to her apartment.

But Simpson wrote in Tuesday’s ruling that “there is no direct connection between the warrantless search and Taylor’s death.” Simpson’s ruling effectively reduced the civil rights violation charges against Jaynes and Meany, which had carried maximum life sentences, to misdemeanors.

The judge declined to dismiss the conspiracy charge against Jaynes, as well as another charge against Meany, who is accused of making false statements to investigators.

When police kicked down Taylor’s door with a drug warrant in March 2020, her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, fired a shot that struck an officer in the leg. Walker said he believed an intruder was rushing inside. Officers returned fire, beating Taylor, a 26-year-old Black woman, to death in her hallway.

Simpson concluded that Walker’s “conduct became the proximate, or legal, cause of Taylor’s death.”

“While the indictment alleges that Jaynes and Meany set in motion a series of events that ended in Taylor’s death, it also alleges that (Walker) disrupted those events when he decided to open fire” on police, Simpson wrote.

Walker was initially arrested and charged with attempted murder of a police officer, but that charge was later dropped after his attorneys argued that Walker did not know he was shooting at police.

“Of course, at this time we are devastated by the judge’s ruling, which we disagree with, and are just trying to process everything,” Taylor’s family wrote in a statement to the Associated Press on Friday. It said prosecutors had told the family they plan to appeal Simpson’s ruling.

“All we can do at this time is remain patient…we will continue to fight until we get full justice for Breonna Taylor,” the statement said.

The U.S. Justice Department said in an email that it was “reviewing the judge’s decision and assessing next steps.”

A third former agent charged in the federal arrest warrant case, Kelly Goodlett, pleaded guilty to a conspiracy charge in 2022 and is expected to testify against Jaynes and Meany at their trials.

Federal prosecutors alleged that Jaynes, who drafted the warrant for Taylor, had told Goodlett days before the warrant was served that he had “verified” through a postal inspector that a suspected drug dealer was receiving packages at Taylor’s apartment. But Goodlett knew that wasn’t true and told Jaynes that the warrant didn’t yet contain enough information linking Taylor to criminal activity, prosecutors said. She added a paragraph stating that the suspected drug dealer was using Taylor’s apartment as his current address, according to court records.

Two months later, when Taylor’s shooting made national headlines, Jaynes and Goodlett met in Jaynes’ garage to “get on the same page” before Jaynes spoke to investigators about the warrant for Taylor’s arrest, court documents show.

A fourth former officer, Brett Hankison, was also charged by federal prosecutors in 2022 with endangering the lives of Taylor, Walker and several of her neighbors when he shot into Taylor’s windows. A trial last year ended in a jury deadlock, but Hankison is set to be retried on those charges in October.