A judge in the US state of Kentucky has sentenced a police officer involved in the 2020 shooting death of Breonna Taylor to 33 months for violating her civil rights.
The sentencing of officer Brett Hankison was announced on Monday at the Louisville court and represents a repudiation to prosecutors, who had requested he receive a one-day sentence.
US District Judge Rebecca Grady Jennings sentenced Hankison at a hearing on Monday afternoon. She said that no prison time “is not appropriate” for Hankison and that she was “startled” that more people had not been injured in the raid.
Taylor, a 26-year-old emergency room technician, was killed in her apartment in the early hours of March 13, 2020, after police executed a so-called no-knock warrant, attempting to storm Taylor’s apartment unannounced, based on faulty evidence that her apartment was involved in a drug operation.
Thinking they were experiencing a home invasion, her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, fired one shot at the suspected intruders. Police responded with approximately 22 shots, some of which went into a neighbour’s apartment, endangering a pregnant woman, her partner and five-year-old son.
A federal jury in November 2024 found Hankison responsible for using excessive force in violation of Taylor’s civil rights.
But last week, Department of Justice lawyers asked that Hankison be given a one-day sentence, plus three years of supervised release, arguing that a lengthy sentence would be “unjust”. Hankison shot 10 bullets into the apartment, though the shots he fired did not hit her.
Taylor’s death, along with the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis at the hands of a white police officer, led to racial justice protests across the United States over the treatment of people of colour by police departments.
During former President Joe Biden’s administration, the Justice Department brought criminal civil rights charges against the officers involved in both Taylor and Floyd’s deaths.
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