(AFP) – The US Justice Department has asked for a one-day prison sentence for a former policeman convicted of violating the civil rights of Breonna Taylor, a Black woman whose 2020 killing sparked protests for police reform and racial justice. Brett Hankison, who was convicted by a federal jury in Kentucky in November of one count of abusing Taylor’s civil rights, is to be sentenced on Monday and faces a maximum penalty of life in prison.
But the head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, in an unusual intervention, asked the judge on Wednesday to sentence Hankison to time served — the day he spent in jail at the time of his arrest — and three years of supervised release. “The government respects the jury’s verdict, which will almost certainly ensure that defendant Hankison never serves as a law enforcement officer again,” said Harmeet Dhillon, who was appointed to the position by President Donald Trump.
“But adding on top of those consequences a sentence within the lengthy guidelines range… would, in the government’s view, simply be unjust,” Dhillon said. “Hankison did not shoot Ms. Taylor and is not otherwise responsible for her death,” she said. “Hankison did not wound her or anyone else at the scene that day, although he did discharge his duty weapon ten times blindly into Ms. Taylor’s home.”
Lawyers for the Taylor family condemned the government’s sentencing recommendation as “an insult to the life of Breonna Taylor.” “Recommending just one day in prison sends the unmistakable message that white officers can violate the civil rights of Black Americans with near-total impunity,” they said in a statement.
Taylor and her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, were sleeping in her Louisville apartment around midnight on March 13, 2020, when they heard a noise at the door. Walker, believing it was a break-in, fired his gun, wounding a police officer. Police, who had obtained a controversial no-knock search warrant to make a drug arrest, fired more than 30 shots back, mortally wounding Taylor.
The deaths of Taylor, 26, and George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man who was murdered by a white police officer in Minneapolis in May 2020, became the focus of a wave of mass protests in the United States and beyond against racial injustice and police brutality. In May, the Justice Department announced it was dropping lawsuits filed by the administration of former president Joe Biden against police forces in Louisville and Minneapolis that accused them of using excessive force and racial discrimination.
© 2024 AFP
