Judge sentences ex-officer in Breonna Taylor raid to nearly 3 years in prison

A Breonna Taylor memorial in Louisville, Ky., on Oct. 2, 2020. Since the death of George Floyd, a national movement promised sweeping justice reform. So far, police prosecutions have resulted in a mixed bag of convictions, acquittals, and a mistrial. (Xavier Burrell/The New York Times)

By Glenn Thrush

A federal judge in Kentucky earlier this week sentenced a former Louisville police officer involved in the fatal raid of Breonna Taylor’s home to nearly three years in prison, in a sharp rebuke to the Trump administration, which had requested he serve only one day behind bars.

In November, a federal jury in Kentucky convicted the former officer, Brett Hankison, of one count of violating Taylor’s civil rights by using excessive force in discharging several shots through her window during a botched drug raid in 2020. Even though none of the 10 shots he fired hit Taylor, Hankison, who is white, was the only officer to be charged for his actions during the botched operation.

The killing of Taylor, 26, in her home became a focal point for the national outrage over police violence against Black people amid a spate of similar acts of violence around the same time, most notably the murder of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis. Taylor’s killing in particular brought national attention to “no knock” warrants, which allow police to burst into homes without warning.

The lingering bitterness surrounding Taylor’s death, and a renewed sense of injustice incited by the Trump administration’s extraordinarily lenient sentencing request, spilled over into protests outside the federal courthouse in Louisville in the hours before the sentencing on Monday.

Last week, Harmeet K. Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, asked the judge in the case, Rebecca Grady Jennings, to sentence Hankison to a single day in prison — essentially the brief time he had served when he was charged, and three years of supervised release.

The request was intended to send the message that the department planned to abandon its long-standing efforts to address racial disparities in policing — and to reorient the civil rights division to pursue President Donald Trump’s culture war agenda at the expense of its founding mission of confronting race-based discrimination.

Jennings, whom Trump appointed to the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Kentucky in his first term, took issue with the department’s extraordinary sentencing request. But she also settled on 33 months, a punishment far short of the maximum sentence of life in prison allowable by law.

Sentencing requests are typically filed by career prosecutors who worked on the case. The filing last week was signed by Dhillon, a political appointee who is a veteran Republican Party activist with close ties to Trump, and one of her deputies.

Shortly after the department made its request public, the family’s legal team issued a statement describing Taylor’s mother, Tamika Palmer, as “heartbroken and angry.”

The legal proceedings stemming from Taylor’s killing, which brought intense scrutiny on the Louisville Metro Police Department, have been drawn out over years of dramatic court battles. In 2023, a judge declared a mistrial in Hankison’s trial on federal civil rights charges after jurors failed to reach a unanimous verdict. He was previously acquitted of similar state charges.

The case fueled months of protests across the country and in Louisville. The city’s police chief was fired amid the demonstrations, and a 2023 report by the Justice Department found that the department had shown a pattern of discriminating against Black people, as well as a pattern of other abusive behavior.

Investigators found instances of police officers subduing residents with neck restraints, choke holds and even dog attacks, and using excessive and escalating force. The report also said officers made unlawful stops and searches based on invalid warrants.

A judge initially signed off on a warrant for Taylor’s apartment, but the officers were later instructed to announce themselves. Whether they actually did has long been in dispute.

The warrant to raid Taylor’s apartment was based on shoddy surveillance. Three officers were charged by federal prosecutors with knowingly including false information in an affidavit to get a judge to approve the raid. One of them, Kelly Goodlett, pleaded guilty in 2022. The case against the two other officers, Joshua Jaynes and Kyle Meany, is still open.

Prosecutors argued that Hankison did not have legal justification to use deadly force when he fired through a window and sliding glass door covered by blinds during the raid, ultimately hitting a neighboring apartment.

Police were seeking evidence that Taylor’s former boyfriend was selling drugs when they barged through her door on March 13, 2020. Her boyfriend at the time of the raid, Kenneth Walker, opened fire on the officers as they entered, later saying that he believed they were intruders.

Two officers, Myles Cosgrove and Jonathan Mattingly, immediately returned fire and shot and killed Taylor. Those two officers — who were also white — were never charged; prosecutors argued that they had been justified in their actions.