DOJ: Brett Hankison Should Serve 24-Hour Sentence

In November 2024, the same month we all found out President Donald Trump would be occupying the Oval Office again, Brett Hankison, a former Louisville police officer who was fired over his involvement in the deadly raid on the home of Breonna Taylor, was found guilty of one count of civil rights abuse for shooting into Taylor’s bedroom window, “which was covered by blinds and a blackout curtain,” The Guardian noted, meaning, above all the other wrongs cops committed that night, they were firing blindly without apparent concern for who they might harm. 

Hankison is due to be sentenced on Monday. He faces a maximum sentence of life in prison. Now, if what has passed for “justice” during the fight to hold Taylor’s killers accountable so far is any indication, Hankison was never going to receive anything close to a life sentence, but if the MAGA-fied U.S. Department of Justice has its way, he won’t do more than a single day.

From the Guardian:

Hankison’s bullets pierced the apartment next door, where a couple with a five-year-old child lived. None of his shots hit Taylor, her boyfriend Kenneth Walker, who was in the room, or her neighbors, investigators found.

In a 16 July sentencing memorandum, Assistant Attorney General for civil rights Harmeet K Dhillon and senior counsel Robert J Keenan said that because Hankison did not shoot anyone and has a clean record otherwise, he should only serve three years of supervised release. It also said that Hankison has suffered psychological stress from the trials. The justice department did not respond to a request for comment.

The memo said that “there is no need for a prison sentence to protect the public from the defendant or to provide ‘just’ punishment or deterrence.”

The memorandum also argued that he was first tried in 2023, ending in a mistrial, and that he was acquitted of a second charge of violating the neighbors’ civil rights.

“The government respects the jury’s verdict, which will almost certainly ensure that defendant Hankison never serves as a law enforcement officer again and will also likely ensure that he never legally possesses a firearm again,” the memo said.

So, the DOJ recommended Hankison serve a 24-hour sentence followed by three years of supervised release — while making sure to portray the shooter as a victim himself, due to his “psychological stress,” not from helping to take Taylor’s life while putting other innocent lives, including a 5-year-old’s, in immediate danger.

Mind you, this same Justice Department, in May, made the decision to end Biden-era police-accountability agreements with Minneapolis and Louisville that came as a result of extensive investigations following the police killings of Taylor and George Floyd. As I noted previously, that decision was made “just one day after it was announced that the very same DOJ approved a nearly $5 million settlement for the family of Ashli Babbitt—the Jan. 6 Capitol rioter who got herself shot and killed by a Capitol police officer, Lt. Michael Byrd, while climbing over a barricade inside the Capitol building that rioters were warned not to breach.”

Since Trump’s return to office, the DOJ has made a clear agenda out of undermining Black civil rights progress, from its blind, propaganda-reliant war on DEI to its fight against police reform to its reversal of settlement agreements for Black Americans who have been harmed by systemic racism. Its focus on white grievance and gutting of cases involving civil rights protections for Black people is why the DOJ recently saw a mass exodus of more than 100 attorneys who resigned from its civil rights division. 

Making America great again means, in part, making white nationalism great again by pretending systemic racism doesn’t exist, and the Trump administration keeps that pretense up by doing its best to serve as a perpetual roadblock in the way of racial justice.

Sad.

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