LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY — In a courtroom marked by grief and disbelief, former Louisville police officer Brett Hankison was sentenced to 33 months in prison on Monday for violating Breonna Taylor’s civil rights during the infamous 2020 raid that ended her life — a raid that sparked a nationwide reckoning on race, policing, and accountability.
But this wasn’t just any sentencing. It came wrapped in political shadows and prosecutorial whiplash.
In a move that stunned many, including Taylor’s family, the Justice Department — under a Trump-era holdover — had asked the court to let Hankison off with just one day behind bars. U.S. District Judge Rebecca Grady Jennings rejected that idea outright, calling it a “180-degree” pivot and suggesting politics had polluted the prosecution’s compass.
“This sentence will not and cannot be measured against Ms. Taylor’s life and the incident as a whole,” Jennings told the packed courtroom, her tone cutting through the room’s tension.
Hankison had been acquitted in state court in 2022. But a federal jury in November 2024 found him guilty of violating Taylor’s civil rights for firing blindly into her apartment during the botched no-knock raid. It wasn’t his bullets that struck Taylor — but it was his recklessness that put lives at risk, the court concluded.
Breonna Taylor, a Black 26-year-old medical worker, was killed when officers burst into her apartment in the middle of the night. Her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, thinking they were intruders, fired once. The police fired back — more than 30 times.
Inside the courtroom, Taylor’s mother, Tamika Palmer, delivered a raw plea to the judge. “A piece of me was taken from me that day,” she said. “You have the power to make today the first day of true accountability.”
Walker, who stood beside her, echoed the pain that’s haunted them for over four years.
Hankison, for his part, apologized. Briefly. He told the court he never would have fired had he known about the faulty warrant that led them there. “I never would have fired my gun,” he said, expressing regret for a tragedy that spiraled far beyond his control.
But the real firestorm erupted over the Justice Department’s sentencing memo. It was submitted by Harmeet Dhillon, a Trump appointee now heading the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, and notably not signed by the career prosecutors who tried the case. The memo emphasized that Hankison didn’t shoot Taylor, essentially detaching his role from her death.
The move wasn’t isolated. Earlier this year, Dhillon scrapped plans for a consent decree with the Louisville police and withdrew previous findings of systemic civil rights abuses in the department — findings that had been based on extensive investigations.
To many, it signaled a rollback of hard-fought reforms, and in this case, a retreat from accountability. Attorneys for Taylor’s family called it “an insult,” a betrayal cloaked in bureaucracy.
While 33 months may be more than a day, the sentence still fell at the low end of federal guidelines. Whether it marks a beginning or an end in the fight for justice is a question only time — and future courts — can answer.
