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Former Louisville officer faces third trial in Breonna Taylor slaying [1]
['David Nakamura']
Date: 2024-03-11
Two years after Louisville police fatally shot Breonna Taylor, her mother made a surprise visit to Justice Department headquarters in Washington to implore federal authorities to hold one or more officers criminally liable for the killing. Sign up for Fact Checker, our weekly review of what's true, false or in-between in politics. ArrowRight Former officer Brett Hankison had been acquitted of state charges of reckless behavior related to Taylor’s death. With a petition signed by 18,000 people, Tamika Palmer that day in 2022 asked senior Justice officials whether there was anything more they could do.
The Justice Department ultimately charged Hankison, who fired his gun in the police raid that killed Taylor but did not strike anyone, with federal civil rights violations. A federal jury deadlocked on those charges, resulting in a mistrial.
Now, nearly four years after Taylor’s killing, federal officials are taking the extraordinary step of placing Hankison before a jury for a third time. The move points to polarizing questions regarding what amounts to justice in the killing of a Black woman during a raid at her home that helped spark nationwide social justice protests. Among those questions: whether the federal government’s push for accountability will be achieved by trying to convict this former officer.
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“He shouldn’t be the only one charged,” said attorney Lonita Baker, who represents Taylor’s mother and sister, Ju’Niyah Palmer in their civil actions seeking justice. “But the reality is that’s where we stand and that’s better than nothing.”
Hankison’s fate in the trial slated for October could go a long way in at minimum determining whether Taylor’s family and supporters eventually feel satisfied with the legal system’s response to her killing. If convicted, he could face a sentence of life in prison.
Taylor was fatally shot March 13, 2020, weeks before George Floyd’s murder while in custody of Minneapolis police.
In the past four years in Louisville, at least five officers, including Hankison, were fired or forced to resign for their roles in the raid, which was part of a drug investigation of a former friend of Taylor’s. Also, Kentucky lawmakers banned no-knock search warrants, and Taylor’s family won a $12 million wrongful death civil settlement from the city.
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Last year, the Justice Department issued an 86-page report documenting systemic racial bias and excessive force by the Louisville Police Department. Authorities announced plans to install a federal monitor to oversee mandatory changes to the police department’s policies and training. Louisville officials expect that consent decree, currently under negotiation, to cost the city up to $10 million per year.
But the failure by authorities to hold an officer directly involved in the raid criminally liable for Taylor’s death is “the most tangible thing people in our community understand,” said Linda Sarsour, co-founder of Until Freedom, a national civil rights group that has worked closely with Taylor’s family.
“People saw police shoot a 26-year-old Black woman in the sanctity of her home,” Sarsour said. “That’s the image they remember. They want somebody to take responsibility for that.”
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In the Floyd case, four former Minneapolis officers were convicted in both state and federal courts for the killing in which the victim was pinned to the ground by his neck for more than nine minutes as an onlooker recorded what happened using her mobile phone.
Convictions of officers for on-duty deadly shootings, however, remain rare. Police in the United States fatally shoot more than 1,000 people per year, according to a Washington Post database that tracks such incidents.
Since 2005, 191 law enforcement officers have been arrested on murder or manslaughter charges, and 60 of them have been convicted of a crime, according to data compiled by Bowling Green State University professors Philip Stinson and Eric Cooke. Of those, six were convicted of murder and 17 for manslaughter, with the rest punished for lesser offenses, the data show.
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“Juries are very reluctant to second-guess the split-second, often life-or-death decisions by on-duty police officers,” Stinson said. “They are just not willing to go there.”
Hankison fired 10 shots during the raid, none of which struck anyone. He was acquitted in state court in March 2022 on charges of wanton endangerment of three neighbors whose apartment was pierced by the shots.
Five months later, the Justice Department charged him with violating the civil rights of Taylor, her boyfriend Kenneth Walker and the three neighbors. The federal jury deadlocked last November.
The only person convicted in connection to the raid has been Kelly Goodlett, a former detective who pleaded guilty to federal charges that she helped falsify the police search warrant that allowed officers to enter the apartment. Goodlett, who faces up to five years in prison, is expected to testify against two other former officers, Joshua Jaynes and Kyle Meany, also charged with making false statements. Their trial date has not been set.
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On the night Taylor was killed, Hankison was among seven officers serving a warrant in the drug investigation. Awakened as police forced entry to her apartment, Walker fired a warning shot from a legally owned handgun that struck officer John Mattingly in the thigh.
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Mattingly and another officer, Myles Cosgrove, returned fire, killing Taylor. Prosecutors said Hankison retreated outside the apartment complex and blindly fired through a window and door, both covered by shades and curtains.
Hankison’s attorneys said federal investigators conducted an expansive investigation, providing more than 1.3 million itemized pages of evidence in discovery.
In the end, however, the basic facts in the federal trial were essentially unchanged from the failed state case, said attorney Stew Mathews, who defended Hankison in both trials.
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Hankison, who testified both times, told jurors he heard gunfire from what he mistakenly believed was a semiautomatic rifle, and he started shooting because he thought fellow officers were at risk of being killed.
Though Cosgrove and other officers testified that Hankison violated police department protocol by firing without identifying a target, defense lawyers argued that he was making a split-second decision to save his colleagues.
In an interview, Mathews said that unless prosecutors uncover new evidence, there is an “extremely high probability” that a third trial would end without a conviction.
“I don’t know what their thinking is other than they dumped a lot of time and money and energy into it and want to take another shot,” Mathews said.
Mathews, who recently stepped down from the defense team because he is retiring, said Hankison, who does not have a full-time job, is paying for his immense legal costs through an officer-defense fund provided by the local police union.
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Louisville attorney Brian Butler, who is defending Meany in the warrant falsification case, suggested the enormous public attention around Taylor’s death put political pressure on the Justice Department to satisfy activists’ demands for a criminal conviction of at least one officer who was at the scene.
He pointed to the personal attention Attorney General Merrick Garland has devoted to the case. Garland held a news conference at the Justice Department in August 2022 to unveil the criminal charges against Hankison and the three others charged with falsifying information, and he traveled to Louisville in March 2023 to announce the findings of the federal investigation into the police department.
“I don’t think you could ever divorce politics from this,” Butler said. “The fact that [Hankison] is being prosecuted in U.S. District Court on civil rights violations when his shots didn’t hit anyone — I’ve never heard of that.”
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Justice Department officials declined to comment, as is customary with ongoing cases.
Georgetown University law professor Paul Butler, a former federal prosecutor, discounted the notion that politics played a role in the Justice Department’s decision-making.
“DOJ may look at this as an old-school civil rights case in which a Southern jury failed to hold to account a White person accused of violence against a Black person,” he said. “I think they’re confident they can get a conviction. Otherwise, it would be seen as vindictive or not the wisest use of resources to bring the case again and lose.”
Legal experts said one factor prosecutors typically consider when weighing whether to retry a case is the breakdown of how many jurors in the initial trial favored conviction or were opposed.
Attorneys for Taylor’s family and for Hankison said they don’t know the answer because U.S. District Court Judge Rebecca Grady Jennings forbade both sides from contacting jurors after the verdict. The jury included one Black person. Legal experts said federal prosecutors are likely to seek more racial diversity for the retrial.
Ibrahim Farag, another attorney for Hankison, said he is reviewing transcripts and evidence to gauge which arguments prosecutors might believe were the most compelling and are likely to emphasize to a new jury.
“It’s truly impossible to tell,” Farag said. “What resonates with people is going to fluctuate.”
Despite their disappointments in court, Taylor’s family and supporters have maintained their civic activism.
Several of those who led the social justice demonstrations in 2020 have since been elected to public office, including state Rep. Keturah Herron and Louisville Metro Council member Shameka Parrish-Wright.
Last fall, Taylor’s mother joined local activists to rally opposition to Republican Daniel Cameron’s ultimately unsuccessful gubernatorial campaign. As the state’s attorney general in 2020, Cameron had angered them by choosing not to bring charges against officers besides Hankison.
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[1] Url:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/03/11/former-louisville-officer-faces-third-trial-breonna-taylor-slaying/
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