The night Breonna Taylor died, Detective Brett Hankison stood outside her apartment and blindly fired 10 bullets through a bedroom window and a sliding glass door, both covered by blinds and curtains . Based on this reckless conduct, a federal jury in Louisville, Ky., last week sentenced Hankison intentionally violate Taylor’s Fourth Amendment rights under cover of law.

Hankison did not kill Taylor, and his puzzling behavior was only one a lot of things that went wrong before, during and after the deadly March 2020 raid, including a misleading and legally deficient search warrant affidavit that linked the 26-year-old EMT to drug trafficking based on little more than guilt by association. But Hankison’s case starkly illustrates the difficulty of holding police officers who abuse their powers criminally accountable.

Hankison was licensed three months after the raid. Acting Police Chief Robert Schroeder said the detective had “demonstrated extreme indifference to the value of human life” by firing his weapon “blindly and without reason” without “verifying that no person posed an immediate threat” or considering “ innocent people present.”

An indictment approved by a Kentucky grand jury in September 2020 also charged Hankison with three crimes for having discharged his weapon “without reason” “in circumstances manifesting extreme indifference towards human life”. THE costs were based on bullets that entered an apartment adjacent to Taylor’s, putting his neighbors in danger.

In March 2022, a state jury, after deliberating for three hours, acquitted Hankison of these accusations, suggesting how much slack jurors tend to give to police officers who claim they used deadly force in response to a perceived threat. Five months later, Hankison was indicted on two federal charges, alleging that he had violated Taylor’s rights as well as those of his neighbors.

Last year, a federal judge declared a mistrial on these charges because the jury did not reach a verdict. In his second federal trial, Hankison again testified that he was trying to help two fellow officers, Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly and Detective Myles Cosgrove, inside Taylor’s apartment, thinking they were under heavy fire.

Hankison was wrong about that. When police broke into the apartment around 12:45 a.m., Taylor’s boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, who later said he did not know the intruders were cops, grabbed a handgun and fired a single bullet, striking Mattingly in the leg.

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

Despite this, Hankison’s response is difficult to understand. “He did exactly what he was supposed to do,” defense attorney Don Malarcik said. said jurors during his final argument. “He was acting to save lives.”

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

Cosgrove, who fired 16 bullets into the apartment, including the one that killed Taylor, did something similar, according to former Louisville interim police chief Yvette Gentry. Nobility canned Cosgrove in December 2020, saying he fired “in three separate directions,” which indicated he “did not identify a target.”

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

Federal fees are always on hold 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 see why Attorney General Merrick Garland suggests that “justice for the loss of Ms. Taylor is a task beyond human capacity.”

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