Former Louisville, Kentucky, police officer Brett Hankison has been acquitted of all the charges he faced in connection to the botched raid in 2020 that left Breonna Taylor dead.
A jury found the former Metro Police Department detective on Thursday not guilty on three counts of wanton endangerment for firing his gun into the apartment of Taylor’s neighbors. Taylor had been a medical technician.
“Justice was done,” said Stewart Matthews, Hankison’s attorney, CNN reported. “The verdict was proper and we are thrilled.”
OFFICERS SHOULDN’T HAVE FIRED INTO BREONNA TAYLOR’S HOME: REPORT
Taylor, a 26-year old emergency room technician, was shot and killed in her apartment by Louisville police on March 13, 2020. Three police officers obtained a “no-knock” warrant and forcibly entered her apartment as part of an anti-drug operation just after midnight, with officers claiming they announced themselves before entering. Taylor’s boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, said they did not.
Walker said he fired a shot at them thinking they were intruders, and law enforcement officials said a bullet hit one of the officers in the leg.
Police fired 32 shots, and Taylor was hit by multiple bullets and died. One of the officers, Brett Hankison, was fired in June 2020, and a grand jury approved an indictment against Hankison for wanton endangerment for shots that endangered Taylor’s neighbors. Hankison, who pleaded not guilty to all three charges in September 2020, was not charged for the death of Taylor. Hankison would have faced five years in prison for each charge if convicted.
Prosecutors argued Hankison, 45, endangered the lives of Taylor’s neighbors.
Roughly 26 witnesses were called upon to testify as prosecutors made the case Hankison aimed his gun recklessly into a window outside of the apartment. The shots put a man, a pregnant woman, and the woman’s 5-year-old son in grave peril, they argued.
#BREAKING: Former Louisville Metro police officer Brett Hankison has been acquitted on wanton endangerment charges for allegedly firing “blindly” into Breonna Taylor’s apartment and hitting a neighboring apartment. @LawCrimeNetwork pic.twitter.com/LYIQxmwKSB
— Law&Crime Network (@LawCrimeNetwork) March 3, 2022
“One or two more inches and I would have been shot, said Cody Etherton, one of Taylor’s neighbors.
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Hankison said he felt “horrible” when he learned the bullets he fired traveled into a neighboring apartment. He also called the botched raid a “tragedy” and “something that didn’t have to happen,” according to NBC News.
The death of Taylor, along with the deaths of other black people in 2020 such as George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery, set off widespread protests over injustices within law enforcement and the justice system. The two other officers involved in the raid of Taylor’s apartment, former Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly and former Detective Myles Cosgrove, have not been charged.
Attorney General Merrick Garland announced last year the Justice Department was opening a “pattern or practice” investigation into Louisville’s government and the city’s police department to determine whether there were violations of constitutional rights or federal statutes.
