A federal judge in Kentucky broke with the Trump administration on Monday, sentencing former Louisville police officer Brett Hankison to almost three years in prison for his role in a home raid that killed Breonna Taylor, a Black medical worker. The Justice Department had recommended that Hankison serve just one day in jail.
Hankison, who fired 10 blind shots during the botched raid on her apartment in March 2020, was the only officer at the scene to face charges tied to Taylor’s death. He is the first person sentenced to prison in a case that rocked Louisville and helped fuel a national uprising over racial injustice and police brutality.
U.S. District Judge Rebecca Grady Jennings, who was appointed by Donald Trump during his first presidency, said the Justice Department’s request for a one-day sentence “is not appropriate” and would have minimized the jury’s decision to convict Hankison last fall.
In November, jurors found Hankison guilty of violating Taylor’s civil rights by using excessive force when he fired several rounds through her covered window. The shots didn’t hit Taylor, but his bullets tore through the walls and entered a neighboring apartment, where a couple and a five-year-old child lived. Taylor was killed by another officer’s gunfire after her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, fired a single warning shot, thinking the officers were intruders.
Jennings, who presided over two of Hankison’s trials, said she was “startled” that more people weren’t injured during the raid, and she criticized the Justice Department’s request to downplay the seriousness of the crime. Some of its arguments, she said from the bench, were “incongruous and inappropriate.”
Hankison was sentenced to 33 months in prison, followed by three years of supervised release.
While Jennings imposed a sentence far shorter than the life term technically available under federal law, she made clear that the Justice Department’s sentencing memo troubled her. Submitted by Harmeet Dhillon, a Trump appointee who leads the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, the memo argued Hankison should receive a one-day sentence (time served) and suggested he never should have faced civil rights charges at all.
The filing marked a sharp break from the department’s previous approach. Under prior leadership, the Justice Department had aggressively pursued charges against Hankison and other officers involved in the fatal raid. But since Trump returned to the White House, federal prosecutors have weakened their stance.
In court, lead federal prosecutor Rob Keenan repeatedly sided with Hankison’s defense on points that would lower the sentence. Prosecutors even argued that Hankison was particularly vulnerable to abuse in prison and suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. Taylor’s mother, Tamika Palmer, expressed frustration that the new team of federal prosecutors hadn’t fought for a harsher sentence.
“There was no prosecution in there for us,” Palmer said after the verdict. “Brett had his own defense team, and I didn’t know he got a second one.”
The Justice Department’s lax recommendation was also slammed by civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who helped Taylor’s family win a $12 million settlement from the city of Louisville. In a post on Facebook, he called it “an insult to the life of Breonna Taylor and a blatant betrayal of the jury’s decision.”
After the hearing, he told The Associated Press that while he had hoped for a longer sentence, he was “grateful” that Hankison is “at least going to prison and has to think for those 3 years about Breonna Taylor and that her life mattered.”
Taylor, a 26-year-old emergency room technician, was killed during a police raid conducted under a warrant based on flimsy and misleading evidence linking her to an ex-boyfriend suspected of drug trafficking. In 2022, three other former and current officers were charged with their roles in allegedly falsifying the warrant that led to the deadly raid. One has pleaded guilty, and trials are pending for the other two.