Washington – The Department of Justice does not seek imprisonment for a former officer who blindly fired Breonna Taylor’s house during a 2020 failed raid that caused a federal investigation of surveillance in Louisville, Kentucky.
Brett Hankison, a former detective of the Louisville Metro Police Department whose shots did not attacked Taylor, was convicted of the deprivation of rights under the color of the law in November. Federal prosecutors said it fired 10 shots through a window and a sliding glass door that was covered with blinds and curtains. Multiple bullets traveled through the wall and to an apartment next door, but did not hit anyone.
The officers who shot the shots that killed Taylor were not accused, since they returned when Taylor’s boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, shot while the police raped the apartment.
In a memorandum of sentence presented on Wednesday night, the Department of Justice wrote that “the reasonable minds could disagree with whether the conduct of the defendant Hankison constituted a convulsion under the fourth amendment in the first place” and that “there is no need for a prison sentence to protect the defendant’s public.” A judge ruled in February that the evidence was enough for a jury to believe that Taylor was still alive when Hankinson shot the first five bullets through the bedroom window.
The judgment memorandum seeks an imprisonment, which is the time that Hankison passed behind bars when he was initially hired by charges. No prosecutor of the career line of the Department of Justice signed the judgment memorandum. On the other hand, the memorandum is signed by the administration official Trump Robert J. Keenan, main advisor to the Civil Rights Division, who was involved in the effort of the Department of Justice to undo a jury’s verdict who found a former attachment of the Los Angeles County guilty of a serious crime in a case of excessive force.
The civil rights division of the Department of Justice has seen a massive review since Trump assumed the position in January, where changes in policies and staff have led to a massive exodus.
The Department of Justice “does not know another prosecution in which a police officer has been accused of depriving the rights of another person under the fourth amendment for returning the heat and not hurting anyone,” according to the memorandum.
The memorandum establishes that “two federal judgments were necessary to obtain a unanimous verdict of guilt” and that, even then “, the jury convicted of a single position,” despite the fact that the elements of the position and the underlying behavior were essentially the same.
Hankison was acquitted by a state position.
“Here, multiple prosecutions were brought against the defendant Hankison, and only one of the three jurors, the last one, found him guilty of these facts, and then just for a position,” says the memorandum. “The Government respects the jury’s verdict, which will surely ensure that the defendant Hankison will never serve as an agent of the law and will probably also ensure that he never legally own a firearm legally.”
Hankison is scheduled to be sentenced on July 21.
