5 Years After Breonna Taylor Was Killed, 1 Officer Gets 33 Months
It’s been over five years since the tragic death of Breonna Taylor, who was fatally shot during a no-knock police raid at her home in Louisville, Kentucky. On Monday, Brett Hankison, a former Louisville Metro Police Department (LMPD) officer, was sentenced to 33 months in prison and three years of supervised release for unlawfully using deadly force and violating Taylor’s Fourth Amendment rights. Hankison, who was convicted in November 2024 on one count of civil rights abuse in a United States District Court for the Western District of Kentucky, had faced up to a maximum sentence of life in prison.Â
“We got something,” Taylor’s mother, Tamika Palmer, told WLKY, a local CBS News affiliate, following the hearing. “I don’t think it was a fair sentencing, but it was a start.”Â
On the night of the fatal police raid in March 2020, LMPD officers arrived at Taylor’s home to conduct a no-knock raid based on a misleading and legally deficient search warrant linking Taylor, a 26-year-old EMT, to drug dealing based on receiving packages for an ex-boyfriend.* Standing outside, Hankison blindly fired 10 rounds into Taylor’s blinds- and curtain-covered window and sliding glass door.*Â
Although none of those shots killed Taylor, Hankison was fired three months after the raid for having “displayed an extreme indifference to the value of human life” and “wantonly and blindly” firing his gun, according to acting Police Chief Robert Schroeder. In September 2020, the former LMPD officer was indicted by a Kentucky grand jury on three felony counts for endangering Taylor’s neighbors based on bullets found in her adjacent apartment. But Hankison was acquitted in March 2022, after the jury unanimously found that he did not act with “wanton endangerment,” despite the clear evidence that he acted recklessly and without regard to whether his gunfire would injure or kill Taylor, her neighbors, or even his fellow officers. As Reason‘s Jacob Sullum wrote following the trial, “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 crimina
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