Despite the best efforts of the Justice Department, former Louisville, Kentucky, police detective Brett Hankison will be going to prison.
For all the open displays of hostility the second Trump administration has exhibited toward the Black community thus far — and there have been many — the Justice Department’s sentencing recommendation for one of the men involved in the fatal raid on Breonna Taylor’s apartment felt like a particularly brazen show of contempt.
Hankison was one of the officers involved in the raid that killed 26-year-old Taylor on March 13, 2020, when several other officers executed a “no knock” search warrant tied to an ex-boyfriend of Taylor’s who did not live at her home.
The Justice Department’s sentencing recommendation for one of the men involved in the fatal raid on Breonna Taylor’s apartment felt like a particularly brazen show of contempt.
Hankison, who fired several shots in the raid, did not fire the shot that killed Taylor, though he was found guilty by a federal jury last November of violating Taylor’s civil rights. And frustratingly, while there remains an investigation into the warrant that authorized the raid, Hankison is the only officer who fired into Taylor’s apartment to be charged and convicted of any crime. Federal prosecutors declined to prosecute the officer who did fire the fatal shot, Myles Cosgrove, stating that he was justified in his actions.
Breonna Taylor’s killing will never yield complete justice, yet if it is left to the Trump administration, Breonna, her grieving family and all those who understand their plight would receive no justice at all.
In a sentencing memorandum Wednesday, Justice Department officials recommended Hankison be given a “downward variance,” or lower sentence, rather than the range recommended by the federal sentencing guidelines. Whereas the U.S. Probation Office recommended 11 to 14 years, the Justice Department request called for Hankison to receive one day’s imprisonment followed by three years of supervised release and a $100 fine. That sentence, had the judge agreed, would have been the equivalent of time served. He would have walked free.
The memorandum was signed by two Trump appointees, Robert J. Keenum, senior counsel for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, and Harmeet Dhillon, the department’s assistant attorney general.
Keenum and Dhillon did not seem concerned with justice for Taylor’s wrongful death. Nor did they seem concerned with her civil rights, focusing instead on Hankison’s well-being. Per the memo, “in light of the three trials of [Hankison] and the media attention given to each trial, it is no surprise that [he] has suffered from resulting stress and psychological problems, including post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, sleeping difficulties and related conditions.”
The memo also claimed that Hankison’s “personal history and characteristics” back up the assertion that “there is no need for a prison sentence to protect the public from the defendant or provide ‘just’ punishment or deterrence.”
Rightfully, lawyers for Taylor’s family referred to this as “an insult” and added that Breonna’s mother, Tamika Palmer, had been “left, once again, heartbroken and angry.” “It is unfathomable that, after finally securing a conviction, the Department of Justice would seek a sentence so drastically below the federal guidelines,” lawyers Ben Crump, Lonita Baker and Sam Aguiar said in a statement condemning the Justice Department recommendation.
“This sets a dangerous precedent,” the statement continued. “When a police officer is found guilty of violating someone’s constitutional rights, there must be real accountability and justice. Recommending just one day in prison sends the unmistakable message that white officers can violate the civil rights of Black Americans with near-total impunity.”
Statistics bear this out. As Crump argued in a separate op-ed for USA Today, a recent study showed Black women and girls are already 40% more likely to be killed by police than white women, even though they are just 15% of the female U.S. population, according to a 2024 study. “More than half of these deaths were callously classified as ‘collateral damage,’ meaning the women were not even the intended targets of the police action that took their lives,” Crump continued. As Crump argued in a separate op-ed for USA Today, a recent study showed Black women and girls are already 40% more likely to be killed by police than white women. And data scientist and policy analyst Samuel Sinyangwe, the founder of Mapping Police Violence, a database of police killings in the United States, highlighted research that suggests police already get more lenient sentences than civilians convicted of the same crimes. Infuriatingly, although U.S. District Judge Rebecca Grady Jennings noted the Justice Department’s recommendation was inappropriate, she also went with a lower number than what was listed in the U.S. Probation Office presentencing report. It is shameful that Brett Hankison will spend less than three years in prison for blindly spraying bullets through an apartment in the middle of the night. It is shameful that the Trump administration, and specifically the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, tried to brazenly subvert justice in the case of an incredibly unjust death. (And likely will try to do so again.) And it is shameful that throughout this case, the justice system has consistently seemed to be on their side. Yet no matter what the president or the assistant attorney general says, Breonna Taylor’s life mattered. And we will continue to speak her name.
Michael Arceneaux
Author of "I Can’t Date Jesus: Love, Sex, Family, Race, and Other Reasons I’ve Put My Faith in Beyoncé" 
