LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Brett Hankison, the former Louisville police officer accused of acting recklessly when he fired shots into Breonna Taylor’s windows the night of the deadly 2020 police raid, is going on trial for a third time.
Federal prosecutors will try again to convict Hankison of civil rights violations after their first effort ended in a mistrial because of a deadlocked jury a year ago. Hankison was also acquitted of wanton endangerment charges for firing 10 shots into Taylor’s apartment at a state trial in 2022.
Jury selection in U.S. District Court in Louisville began Tuesday. In last year’s trial, the process took most of three days.
Hankison is the only officer who has faced a jury trial so far in Taylor’s death, which sparked months of street protests for the fatal shooting of the 26-year-old Black woman by white officers, drawing national attention to police brutality incidents in the summer of 2020. Though he was not one of the officers who shot Taylor, federal prosecutors say Hankison’s actions put Taylor and her boyfriend and her neighbors in danger.
Community organizers and faith leaders were present outside of the courthouse ahead of Tuesday’s proceedings.
“I’m looking at my old Kentucky home and I’m wondering, are we going to ever see something different right now?,” asked Antonio Brown, who was active in the community during the protests following Taylor’s death in 2020.
He’s hoping for a decisive conclusion to this case.
“I would like to see some people of color on that jury. It seems like every time we got a case, it’s going to get thrown out because how they picking the juries,” Brown said. “They know what they’re doing and it’s deliberate.”
Along with Brown, members of the civil rights group National Action Network described how it feels to be preparing for a third trial.
“We’re tired that we have to keep going through the same old stuff since 2020, but we are energized for the right for justice,” Rev. Alonso Malone Jr. said.
“We have to believe that justice delayed does not mean that justice will be denied,” added Rev. James Elliott.
On the night of the raid, Louisville officers went to Taylor’s house to serve a drug warrant, which was later found to be flawed. Taylor’s boyfriend, believing an intruder was barging in, fired a single shot that hit one of the officers, and officers returned fire, striking Taylor in her hallway multiple times.
As those shots were being fired, Hankison, who was behind a group of officers at the door, ran to the side of the apartment and fired into Taylor’s windows, later saying he thought he saw a figure with a rifle and heard assault rifle rounds being fired.
“I had to react,” Hankison testified in last year’s federal trial. “I had no choice.”
Some shots went through Taylor’s apartment and into another unit where a couple and a child lived. Those neighbors have testified at Hankison’s previous trials.
Police were looking for drugs and cash in Taylor’s apartment, but they found neither.
At the conclusion of testimony in Hankison’s trial last year, the 12-member jury struggled for days to reach a consensus. Jurors eventually told U.S. District Judge Rebecca Grady Jennings they were deadlocked and could not come to a decision — prompting Jennings’ declaration of a mistrial.
The judge said there were “elevated voices” coming from the jury room at times during deliberations, and court security officials had to visit the room. Jennings said the jury had “a disagreement that they cannot get past.”
Hankison was one of four officers who was charged by the U.S. Department of Justice in 2022 with violating Taylor’s civil rights. The two counts against him carry a maximum penalty of life in prison if he is convicted.
U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said Taylor “should be alive today” when he announced the federal charges in Aug. 2022.
But those charges so far have yielded just one conviction — a plea deal from a former Louisville officer who was not at the raid and became a cooperating witness — while felony civil rights charges against two officers accused of falsifying information in the warrant used to enter Taylor’s apartment were thrown out by a judge last month.
In that ruling, a federal judge in Louisville wrote that the actions of Taylor’s boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, who fired a shot at police, were the legal cause of her death, not a bad warrant. The ruling effectively reduced the civil rights violation charges against former officers Joshua Jaynes and Kyle Meany, which had carried a maximum sentence of life in prison, to misdemeanors. They still face other lesser federal charges, and prosecutors have since indicted Jaynes and Meany on additional charges.