http://archive.today/2025.07.17-200544/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/17/us/politics/justice-department-brett-hankison-sentence-breonna-taylor.html
The chief of the Justice Department’s civil rights unit has asked a federal judge to sentence a Louisville police officer convicted in the 2020 killing of Breonna Taylor to one day in jail, a stunning reversal of the unit’s longstanding efforts to address racial disparities in policing.
Last year, a federal jury in Kentucky convicted Brett Hankison, the officer, of one count of violating Ms. Taylor’s civil rights by using excessive force in discharging several shots through Ms. Taylor’s window during a drug raid that went awry.
Mr. Hankison, who is white, was the only officer to be charged for his actions during the botched operation that prompted of protests across the country. His shots did not kill Ms. Taylor, a 26-year-old Black woman who worked as an emergency room technician. Two other officers, also white, fired the fatal shots, but neither was charged.
He faces a maximum sentence of life in prison, and a judge will consider the government’s request at a sentencing scheduled for next week.
On Wednesday, Harmeet K. Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, asked the judge in the case, Rebecca Grady Jennings, to sentence Mr. Hankison to time he had already served, in addition to one day in prison and three years of supervised release.
In the filing, Ms. Dhillon suggested the prosecution was excessive, arguing that the Biden Justice Department had secured a conviction against Mr. Hankison after his acquittal on state charges and the ending of his first federal trial in a mistrial.
“In this case, two federal trials were ultimately necessary to obtain a unanimous verdict of guilt,” Ms. Dhillon wrote, adding that Mr. Hankison, now a felon who was fired from his job five years ago, had already paid a substantial penalty for his actions.
“The jury’s verdict 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 filing added.
Such requests are typically filed by career prosecutors who worked on the case. Wednesday’s filing was signed by Ms. Dhillon, a political appointee who is a veteran Republican Party activist with close ties to President Trump, and one of her deputies.
Shortly after Mr. Trump was sworn in for his second term, his political appointees at the Justice Department ordered an immediate halt to all new civil rights cases or investigations — and signaled that it might back out of Biden-era agreements with police departments that engaged in discrimination or violence, according to two internal memos sent to staff.
In May, Ms. Dhillon announced she was backing out of Biden-era agreements with Louisville and Minneapolis that were intended to enact policing reforms in the wake of the Taylor killing and murder of George Floyd, calling them “overbroad” and bureaucratic.
