A Jury Concludes That Blindly Firing 10 Rounds Into Breonna Taylor’s Apartment Was Not ‘Wanton Endangerment’

On the night that Louisville police killed Breonna Taylor, Detective Brett Hankison fired 10 rounds into the side of her apartment, shooting through a glass patio door and a bedroom window that were both covered by blinds. He did this while two of his colleagues, Detective Myles Cosgrove and Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly, were inside the apartment, firing 22 rounds down a dark hallway in response to a single round that Taylor’s boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, had fired at the intruders, whom he mistook for violent criminals. Three of Hankison’s bullets penetrated the wall separating Taylor’s apartment from the neighboring unit, terrifying the people who lived there.

These facts alone are enough to show that Hankison acted recklessly, without regard to the risk that his panicked, indiscriminate response to the gunfire would injure or kill his fellow officers, Taylor, or her neighbors. Yet after deliberating for just three hours yesterday, a jury unanimously decided that Hankison was not guilty of wanton endangerment. That decision vividly illustrates how difficult it is to hold police officers accountable for using excessive force even in the rare cases where they face criminal charges. Despite some recent exceptions, jurors tend to give cops a pass even when their actions are patently outrageous, granting them absolution for conduct that would send ordinary citizens to prison.

Hankison faced three charges of wanton endangerment, one for each of the people in the apartment next to Taylor’s: Cody Etherton, Chelsey Napper (who was pregnant at the time), and her 5-year-old son. The charges, which are punishable by up to five years in prison for each count, alleged that Hankison “wantonly engage[d] in conduct which create[d] a substantial danger of death or serious physical injury to another person” in circumstances that indicated an “extreme indifference to the value of human life.”

That language jibes with the conclusions that Louisville’s interim police chief, Robert Schroeder, reached when he fired Hankison in June 2020, three months after the raid that killed Taylor, an unarmed 26-year-old EMT who died in the hail of bullets fired by Cosgrove and Mattingly. “Your actions displayed an extreme indifference to the value of human life when you wantonly and blindly fired ten (10) rounds into the apartment,” Schroeder wrote in his termination letter to Hankison. “These rounds created a substantial danger of death and serious injury to Breonna Taylor and the three occupants of the apartment next to Ms. Taylor’s…I find your conduct a shock to the conscience. I am alarmed and stunned you used deadly force in this fashion.”

The grand jurors who approved the charges against Hankison that September were similarly shocked, alarmed, and stunned by his conduct. Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron, although he concluded that Cosgrove and Mattingly had acted in self-defense, likewise did not think Hankison’s use of deadly force was justified. But the jurors who acquitted him evidently disagreed. The question is why.

Hankison testified that he was initially positioned behind Cosgrove and Mattingly as they broke into Taylor’s apartment around 12:40 a.m. to serve a search warrant aimed at discovering evidence of her former boyfriend’s drug dealing. Hankison said he saw Mattingly go down after he was struck in the leg by Walker’s bullet. The muzzle flash briefly illuminated the apartment, and Mattingly told investigators he saw “a figure in a shooting stance” holding a rifle, possibly