A jury on Thursday acquitted the only police officer implicated after the death of African-American Breonna Taylor, shot dead nearly two years ago in her apartment and since become an icon of the Black Lives Matter movement. White policeman Brett Hankison, 45, was not charged with the death of the young woman, but with having “endangered” his neighbors by discharging his weapon through a partition.
After a week of trial and three hours of deliberation, the jurors declared him “not guilty”. He greeted the news with sobs. This verdict is likely to rekindle anger in Louisville, the largest city in Kentucky, which caught fire in September 2020, when prosecutors had given up pursuing the other police officers involved in the tragedy and had retained only one count of supplementary charge against Brett Hankison.
Killed by twenty bullets
It is “new proof of police impunity” and it “shows the work that remains to be done before we can say that our judicial system is fair”, criticized the famous lawyer Ben Crump, who defended the family of Breonna Taylor and numerous victims of police violence. But Brett Hankison’s lawyer, Stew Mathews, praised “a suitable verdict”. “Justice has been done”, he commented, considering that his client had just “done his police job”.
On March 13, 2020, three Louisville police officers broke into the home of Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old caregiver, in the middle of the night as part of a drug trafficking investigation targeting her former boyfriend. His new companion Kenneth Walker had believed them to be burglars and had fired a shot with a legally owned weapon. The police responded and Breonna Taylor received around 20 bullets. The agents had a so-called “no knock” warrant, authorizing them to break down the door without warning. They claim to have announced themselves all the same, which Kenneth Walker disputes.
The death of Breonna Taylor did not attract much attention at first, but she returned to the front of the stage a few months later as part of the large anti-racism demonstrations which shook the United States after the death of George Floyd, a black man in his forties suffocated by a white police officer in Minneapolis on May 25, 2020. To put an end to a civil complaint, the town hall of Louisville agreed to pay twelve million dollars to the family of Breonna Taylor and to hire first reforms of its police. Its law enforcement agencies are also the subject of a federal government investigation into their practices.
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