Nearly five years after Breonna Taylor’s death, justice remains elusive

The night Breonna Taylor died, Detective Brett Hankison stood outside her apartment and blindly fired ten shots through a bedroom window and a sliding glass door, both covered by blinds and curtains. Because of this reckless behavior, a federal jury in Louisville, Kentucky, last week convicted Hankison of willfully violating Taylor’s Fourth Amendment rights under the guise of the law.

Hankison didn’t kill Taylor, and his baffling behavior was just one of many things that went wrong before, during and after the deadly raid in March 2020, including a misleading and legally deficient affidavit implicating the 26-year-old paramedic Connected drug trafficking is based on little more than guilt by association. But Hankison’s case highlights how difficult it is to hold police officers criminally accountable for abuse of their authority.

Hankison was fired three months after the raid. Acting Police Chief Robert Schroeder said the detective “displayed an extreme indifference to the value of human life” by “blindly and wantonly” firing his weapon without “verifying every person as an imminent threat” or “any innocent people present.” People” must be taken into account.

An indictment approved by a Kentucky grand jury in September 2020 also charged Hankison with three felonies for “intentionally” firing his weapon “under circumstances that expressed extreme indifference to human life.” The charge stemmed from bullets entering an adjacent apartment owned by Taylor and endangering her neighbors.

In March 2022, a state jury acquitted Hankison of those charges after deliberating for three hours, signaling the laxity jurors give to police officers who say they used deadly force in response to a perceived threat. Five months later, Hankison was indicted on two federal charges for violating Taylor’s rights as well as those of her neighbors.

Last year, a federal judge invalidated the trial on those charges because the jury could not reach a verdict. During his second federal trial, Hankison testified again that he tried to help two colleagues, Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly and Detective Myles Cosgrove were at Taylor’s apartment and thought they were under sustained fire.

Hankison was wrong. When police broke into the apartment around 12:45 p.m., Taylor’s friend Kenneth Walker, who later said he had no idea the intruders were police officers, grabbed a handgun and fired a single cartridge, the Mattingly hit in the leg.

In response, Mattingly and Cosgrove fired a total of 22 shots into a dark hallway where Taylor, who was unarmed, stood next to Walker. Hankison testified that he mistook his colleagues’ shots for shots from an AR-15 rifle that “went down the hallway and executed everyone.”

Still, Hankison’s reaction is difficult to understand. “He did exactly what he was supposed to do,” defense attorney Don Malarcik told jurors during his closing argument. “He acted to save lives.”

That’s not the case, said Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Songer. Hankison “violated one of the most basic rules of deadly force,” Songer told the jury. “If they can’t see the person they’re shooting at, they can’t pull the trigger.”

According to Yvette Gentry, Louisville’s former interim police chief, Cosgrove, who fired 16 shots into the apartment, including the one that killed Taylor, did something similar. Gentry expelled Cosgrove in December 2020, saying he fired “in three distinctly different directions,” suggesting he “did not identify a target.”

An investigation by Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron still concluded that both Cosgrove and Mattingly fired in self-defense, meaning criminal charges were not warranted. So far, Hankison, who was found guilty of the charges against Taylor but acquitted of the charges against her neighbors, is the only officer directly involved in the raid to be convicted of a crime.

Federal charges remain pending against former Detective Joshua Jaynes, who wrote the search warrant affidavit, and former Sgt. Kyle Meany, who approved it. But it’s not hard to understand why Attorney General Merrick Garland suggests that “justice for Ms. Taylor’s loss is a task beyond human capacity.”

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