The U.S. Department of Justice’s recommendation of a single day in jail for the former Louisville police officer convicted in the aftermath of the fatal raid on Breonna Taylor’s home is yet another poke in the eye of Black Americans and yet another example of why the Black Lives Matter movement was founded.
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It would seem unnecessary to name a movement after a concept as obvious as the intrinsic value of Black life. There is no water-is-wet movement; no sun-is-hot movement.
But when police officers burst into the home of a 26-year old Black medical worker in search of former boyfriend who was not there, when those officers shoot and kill her after her actual boyfriend attempted to defend her, when, five years later, no one had been sentenced to prison for her killing, the necessity of BLM becomes clear.
Brett Hankison was among the officers who fired his weapon during the 2020 raid. His 10 shots struck no one, but a federal jury convicted him of violating Taylor’s civil rights by using excessive force.
Time for Hankison to pack up and head on off to prison, right…? He faced a possible sentence of life. That, however, is not what President Donald Trump’s DOJ wanted.
Prosecutors who typically ask for long sentences in cases involving a person’s death instead noted that Hankison had not been convicted in two previous trials connected to the case. They said he could be abused in prison and that he suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder.
Seems that firing those 10 bullets into Taylor’s home while his fellow officers killed her with their own shots has stressed Hankison out.
Better arguments for leniency couldn’t have been made by Hankison’s defense attorneys. Prosecutors asked the judge to sentence Hankison to time served, which was the single day he was locked up after his arrest.
Trump’s DOJ, which took over the federal prosecution of Hankison after Joe Biden’s defeat in the presidential election, meant to send a message: Black lives, in fact, do not matter — especially when police officers snuff them out.
The judge in the case, Rebecca Grady Jennings, heard that message loudly and clearly. She said the feds were treating Hankison’s actions as “an inconsequential crime.” She called prosecutors’ arguments for the sentence “incongruous and inappropriate.”
Taylor’s mother, Tamika Palmer, got the prosecution’s message, too. “There was no prosecution in there for us,” she said. “Brett had his own defense team. I didn’t know he got a second one.”
Jennings ended up sentencing Hankison to 33 months in prison. Still, no Black American could miss the bigger point: Prosecutors in their federal government sought no real punishment for a white police officer who fired bullets into the home of a young Black woman during a botched raid that killed her.
Civil rights attorney Ben Crump summed it up succinctly: “While today’s sentence is not what we had hoped for – nor does it fully reflect the severity of the harm caused – it is more than what the Department of Justice sought. That, in itself, is a statement.”
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