WASHINGTON — The Justice Department is seeking no prison time for a former officer who blindly shot into Breonna Taylor’s home during a botched 2020 raid that sparked a federal inquiry into policing in Louisville, Kentucky.
Brett Hankison, a former Louisville Metro Police Department detective whose shots did not strike Taylor, was convicted of deprivation of rights under color of law in November. Federal prosecutors said he fired 10 shots through a window and a sliding glass door that were covered with blinds and curtains. Multiple bullets traveled through the wall and into an apartment next door but did not hit anyone.
The officers who fired the shots that killed Taylor were not charged, as they were returning fire when Taylor’s boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, fired as police breached the apartment.
In a sentencing memo filed late Wednesday, the Justice Department wrote that “reasonable minds might disagree as to whether defendant Hankison’s conduct constituted a seizure under the Fourth Amendment in the first place” and that there “is no need for a prison sentence to protect the public from defendant.” A judge ruled in February that the evidence was sufficient for a jury to believe that Taylor was still alive when Hankison fired the first five bullets through the bedroom window.
The sentencing memo seeks one day of incarceration, which is the length of time that Hankison spent behind bars when he was initially booked on charges. No career line prosecutors from the Justice Department signed off on the sentencing memo. The memo is instead signed by Trump administration official Robert J. Keenan, senior counsel for the Civil Rights Division, who was involved in the Justice Department's effort to undo a jury verdict that found a former Los Angeles County deputy guilty of a felony charge in an excessive force case.
The Justice Department's Civil Rights Division has undergone a massive overhaul since Trump took office in January, in which policy and personnel changes have led to a mass exodus.
The Justice Department “is unaware of another prosecution in which a police officer has been charged with depriving the rights of another person under the Fourth Amendment for returning fire and not injuring anyone,” according to the memo.
The memo says that "two federal trials were ultimately necessary to obtain a unanimous verdict of guilt" and that, even then, "the jury convicted on only one count," even though the elements of the charge and underlying conduct were essentially the same.
Hankison was acquitted on a state charge.
“Here, multiple prosecutions against defendant Hankison were brought, and only one of three juries — the last one — found him guilty on these facts, and then only on one charge," the memo says. "The government respects the jury’s verdict, which will almost certainly ensure that defendant Hankison never serves as a law enforcement officer again and will also likely ensure that he never legally possesses a firearm again.”
Former Civil Rights Division official Samantha Trepel wrote on LinkedIn that bullets fired by Hankison had “missed a sleeping baby by about two feet." She predicted the court would recognize the Justice Department’s request as a “transparent, last minute political interference into a case that was tried by non-political, longtime career prosecutors who obtained this conviction in front of an all-white jury of Kentucky citizens before a Trump-appointed judge.”
Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, a Democrat who previously served as the state's attorney general and is toying with a run for president, told reporters, "I think it’s important that they are treated like anyone else who is brought up on these charges and that the DOJ should not be playing politics in any case."
Hankison is scheduled to be sentenced Monday.
