Trump's Perversion of Justice Has Reached a New Phase
Last week, Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, asked a federal judge to sentence a former Louisville police officer named Brett Hankison to one day in prison. Last year, a Kentucky jury convicted Hankison of violating Breonna Taylor's civil rights when he fired multiple rounds from his handgun into her apartment on the night the police killed her.
The Taylor case was one of a series of dreadful killings of unarmed Black Americans that helped touch off America's racial reckoning in 2020. It was also a paradigmatic example of the way that flawed systems interact with reckless police conduct to create fatal injustice.
In the early morning hours of March 13, 2020, police officers gathered outside Taylor's apartment door. They had obtained a no-knock search warrant based on allegations that a suspected drug dealer named Jamarcus Glover had received packages at Taylor's home. Glover and Taylor once had a relationship, but Taylor was not the target of the warrant.
The police on the scene were instructed to knock, even though they had a no-knock warrant. And here's where the stories of witnesses start to diverge. Officers at the scene say they knocked and announced that they were the police. The early 911 calls indicate that neighbors didn't know the police were present.
In fact, in initial statements made after the raid, not a single neighbor reported having heard the police identify themselves. One witness initially said the police did not announce themselves, but he later changed his story and claimed he heard the police identify themselves.
Taylor was in the apartment with her boyfriend, a man named Kenneth Walker. He testified that they were startled by a loud pounding on the door, and he said he never heard the police announce themselves. Concerned that the pounding might be coming from an intruder, he grabbed his gun, which he owned lawfully, and approached the door.
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