A US federal judge on Monday rejected an appeal for leniency by the US Department of Justice (DOJ) and sentenced a former police officer to 33 months in prison for violating the civil rights of a black woman whose 2020 killing fueled widespread protests.
Brett Hankison, a former Louisville police department detective, was convicted by a jury in Kentucky in November last year of one count of abusing Breonna Taylor’s civil rights for shots fired during a botched police raid on her home.
In an unusual intervention, Harmeet Dhillon, the head of the justice department’s civil rights division, had asked Judge Rebecca Jennings last week to sentence Hankison to time served — the single day he spent in jail at the time of his arrest, but Jennings, who was appointed to the bench by US President Donald Trump during his first term as president, rejected the recommendation and said she was troubled by the prosecutor’s sentencing memorandum and arguments for leniency, the Louisville Courier Journal reported.
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She sentenced him to 33 months in prison and three years of supervised release. Hankison faced a maximum penalty of life in prison.
The deaths of Taylor, 26, and George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man who was murdered by a white police officer in Minneapolis in May 2020, became the focus of a wave of mass protests in the US and beyond against racial injustice and police brutality.
Taylor and her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, were sleeping in her Louisville apartment at about midnight on March 13, 2020, when they heard a noise at the door.
Walker, believing it was a break-in, fired his gun, wounding a police officer.
Police, who had obtained a controversial no-knock search warrant to make a drug arrest, fired more than 30 shots back, mortally wounding Taylor.
Hankison fired 10 shots during the raid, some into a neighboring apartment, but did not hit anyone. He is the only police officer convicted in connection with the raid.
Responding to Monday’s verdict, the Taylor family’s lawyers noted that while the sentence did not “fully reflect the severity of the harm caused,” it was “more than what the Department of Justice sought.”
“We respect the court’s decision, but we will continue to call out the DOJ’s failure to stand firmly behind Breonna’s rights and the rights of every black woman whose life is treated as expendable,” they said in a statement.
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