Three years on from her death, will the officers who killed Breonna Taylor be held accountable?
No officer has been charged over shooting that killed the Louisville resident. That may change with long-awaited civil rights trial, writes Josh Marcus
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In early 2022, Louisville community members and police reform activists were facing disappointment as well as despair: none of the officers involved in the lethal 2020 no-knock raid that killed Breonna Taylor were charged in connection with her death.
On top of that, former Louisville Metropolitan Police Department officer Brett Hankison, the one officer who faced any charges at all, who was accused of wanton endangerment for firing blindly into a neighbouring appartment containing three people, was acquitted in March of 2022.
It seemed like nothing would come of the mass, nationwide protests that followed the deaths of Taylor and George Floyd in 2020.
“We won’t let this go,” one protest organiser, Chris Wells, chanted in Louisville after the verdict came down.
Now, three years after the raid that killed Taylor, a Black 26-year-old emergency room technician, the current and former LVMPD officers at the heart of the controversial operation are facing a new set of charges. Will the result this time be different?
Jury selection began on Monday in the case against Mr Hankison, a 17-year veteran of the LVMPD who fired 10 rounds through a glass door and window during the raid.
Last year, the Department of Justice charged him with excessive force and violating the civil rights of Taylor, her boyfriend Kenneth Walker, and their three neighbours.
Prosecutors said Mr Hankison, who was fired in 2020, continued to discharge his weapon after “there was no longer a lawful objective justifying the use of deadly force.”
The charges could carry a sentence of life in prison.
The former officer has pleaded not guilty.
During the 13 March raid, which was carried out in service of a drug investigation where the main suspect was already under arrest, officers said they knocked on the door of Taylor’s apartment and identified themselves as police.
Residents, including Walker, who fired on officers who broke through the door thinking they were intruders, dispute this characterisation.
During his state trial, Mr Hankison said he mistook the sound of his fellow officers firing handguns back at Walker as the sound of someone using a semiautomatic rifle against the assembled police, including an officer that Walker shot in the leg.
“It appeared to me that they were being executed with this rifle,” the detective testified, claiming he had “absolutely not” done anything wrong.
The Louisville trial is expected to last for weeks.
Mr Hankison isn’t the only one having his role probed in the controversial shooting, which prompted a damning federal investigation of the LVMPD and a new Kentucky law limiting no-knock raids.
Federal officials also accuse other officers involved in the operation of falsifying the warrant used to launch the search on Taylor’s apartment, then meeting in a garage after she was killed to “tell investigators a false story."
In response, former LVMPD detective Kelly Goodlett pleaded guilty, admitting that she “helped another LMPD detective, and their supervisor obtain a warrant to search Taylor’s home, despite knowing that the officers lacked probable cause to do so,” per the DoJ.
The falsifications included claiming in the warrant a US Postal Inspector verified that a suspect in the narcotics investigation was receiving packages at Taylor’s apartment, even though another detective told Goodlett “there’s nothing there,” according to federal prosecutors.
Fellow former officers Joshua Jayne and Kyle Meany, have pleaded not guilty on charges related to the warrant and will face trial in 2024, where Goodlett will testify against them.
The DoJ found pervasive abuse in the LVMPD, according to a report released in March.
The police agency used excessive force, no-knock warrants, and “discriminates against Black people,” according to the Justice probe.
“This unacceptable and unconstitutional conduct erodes the community trust necessary for effective policing,” attorney general Merrick Garland said in a statement about the findings at the time. “It is also an affront to the vast majority of officers who put their lives on the line to serve Louisville with honor.”
The attorney general said in a press conference that the investigation revealed shocking misconduct, including officers calling Black people “monkeys” and “boy,” as well as police videotaping themselves throwing drinks at pedestrians and mocking people with disabilities.
A 2021 independent review of the department showed that Black drivers were 60 per cent more likely to be stopped than their share in the population, and that the community had little trust in the department.
At the time, only 12.5 per cent of LMPD employeers were Black, reflecting less than half of Black people’s share in the Louisville population.