A federal decide in Kentucky broke with the Trump administration on Monday, sentencing former Louisville police officer Brett Hankison to nearly three years in jail for his function in a house raid that killed Breonna Taylor, a Black medical employee. The Justice Division had advisable that Hankison serve simply sooner or later in jail.
Hankison, who fired 10 blind pictures in the course of the botched raid on her condominium in March 2020, was the one officer on the scene to face expenses tied to Taylor’s loss of life. He’s the primary individual sentenced to jail in a case that rocked Louisville and helped gas a nationwide rebellion over racial injustice and police brutality.
U.S. District Choose Rebecca Grady Jennings, who was appointed by Donald Trump throughout his first presidency, mentioned the Justice Division’s request for a one-day sentence “is not appropriate” and would have minimized the jury’s choice to convict Hankison final fall.
Breonna Taylor, proven in an undated photograph.
In November, jurors discovered Hankison responsible of violating Taylor’s civil rights through the use of extreme pressure when he fired a number of rounds by her coated window. The pictures didn’t hit Taylor, however his bullets tore by the partitions and entered a neighboring condominium, the place a pair and a five-year-old little one lived. Taylor was killed by one other officer’s gunfire after her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, fired a single warning shot, pondering the officers had been intruders.
Jennings, who presided over two of Hankison’s trials, mentioned she was “startled” that extra folks weren’t injured in the course of the raid, and he or she criticized the Justice Division’s request to downplay the seriousness of the crime. A few of its arguments, she mentioned from the bench, had been “incongruous and inappropriate.”
Hankison was sentenced to 33 months in jail, adopted by three years of supervised launch.
Whereas Jennings imposed a sentence far shorter than the life time period technically out there beneath federal regulation, she made clear that the Justice Division’s sentencing memo troubled her. Submitted by Harmeet Dhillon, a Trump appointee who leads the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, the memo argued Hankison ought to obtain a one-day sentence (time served) and steered he by no means ought to have confronted civil rights expenses in any respect.
The submitting marked a pointy break from the division’s earlier method. Beneath prior management, the Justice Division had aggressively pursued expenses in opposition to Hankison and different officers concerned within the deadly raid. However since Trump returned to the White Home, federal prosecutors have weakened their stance.
In courtroom, lead federal prosecutor Rob Keenan repeatedly sided with Hankison’s protection on factors that will decrease the sentence. Prosecutors even argued that Hankison was notably susceptible to abuse in jail and suffered from post-traumatic stress dysfunction. Taylor’s mom, Tamika Palmer, expressed frustration that the brand new group of federal prosecutors hadn’t fought for a harsher sentence.
Legal professional Ben Crump, left, stands beside Tamika Palmer, mom of Breonna Taylor, heart; and Kenneth Walker, Taylor’s boyfriend, heart proper, exterior the federal courthouse in Louisville, Kentucky, on July 21.
“There was no prosecution in there for us,” Palmer mentioned after the decision. “Brett had his own defense team, and I didn’t know he got a second one.”
The Justice Division’s lax suggestion was additionally slammed by civil rights lawyer Ben Crump, who helped Taylor’s household win a $12 million settlement from the town of Louisville. In a submit on Fb, he known as it “an insult to the life of Breonna Taylor and a blatant betrayal of the jury’s decision.”
After the listening to, he informed The Related Press that whereas he had hoped for an extended sentence, he was “grateful” that Hankison is “at least going to prison and has to think for those 3 years about Breonna Taylor and that her life mattered.”
Taylor, a 26-year-old emergency room technician, was killed throughout a police raid performed beneath a warrant based mostly on flimsy and deceptive proof linking her to an ex-boyfriend suspected of drug trafficking. In 2022, three different former and present officers had been charged with their roles in allegedly falsifying the warrant that led to the lethal raid. One has pleaded responsible, and trials are pending for the opposite two.
