Brett Hankison, the only officer hit with criminal charges in connection to the deadly 2020 police shooting of Breonna Taylor, has been found not guilty on all charges in a Kentucky court.
Mr Hankison, 45, was charged with three counts of wanton endangerment for firing blindly into Ms Taylor’s apartment during a no-knock police raid.
None of the former officer’s rounds struck Ms Taylor, a 26-year-old Black woman and emergency room technician. Instead, the bullets passed through her home into a neighbouring residence occupied by a couple and their five-year-old child.
The jury reached its conclusion after three hours of deliberation on Thursday.
“I think it was absolutely the fact that he was doing his job as a police officer,” defence attorney Stewart Mathews told CBS News. “The jury felt like you go out and perform your duty and your brother officer gets shot, you got a right to defend yourself. Simple as that.”
The encounter at issue in the five-day trial began on 13 March 202 when a team of three officers arrived at Taylor’s apartment to carry out a search in a drug investigation linked to her ex-boyfriend.
The Louisville Metropolitan Police Department (LMPD) has said their officers gave warning before entering the apartment, while Taylor’s boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, said he got no response when he asked who was outside.
As the front door was broken down, Mr Walker fired his legal firearm at what he believed were intruders, prompting officers to respond with a hail of bullets, including Mr Hankison, who backed out of the door way and shot through a window.
During the trial, the former officer argued he was trying to protect his squad mates from what he believed was an assailant carrying a rifle, though no rifle was recovered from the scene of the shooting.
“I thought I could put rounds through that bedroom window and stop the threat,” he testified.
State officials, meanwhile, argued the former officer put Taylor, fellow officers, and residents of the apartment complex at risk due to his “extreme indifference to human life.”
“His wanton conduct could have multiplied one tragic death by three,” Assistant Attorney General Barbara Mains Whaley said.
That was the conclusion reached by the LMPD. Mr Hankison was fired from the Louisville police department in June of 2020 following the controversial shooting.
The then-police chief wrote that Mr Hankison’s actions were a “shock to the conscience” and “created a substantial danger of death and serious injury to Breonna Taylor and three occupants of the apartment next to Ms Taylor’s”.
“You have never been trained by the Louisville Metro Police Department to use deadly force in this fashion,” the letter continues.
Mr Hankison has appealed the firing, a process which was on hold the trial continued.
The jury also heard testimony from Cody Etherton, whose apartment Mr Hankison accidentally fired into.
“One or two more inches and I would have been shot,” he told the court.
Local activists like Israel McCullough condemned the verdict, saying the jury acquitted a man who was in the process of “breaking into a house and murdering an unarmed Black woman in her apartment.”
The not guilty verdict effectively ends the accountability process about the shooting. All of the officers involved in raid have either been fired or retired, and the Kentucky attorney general declined to press charges related to the shooting itself, since officers were fired upon first.
The shooting inspired widespread national condemnation, and was one of the many deaths of Black people at the hands of police in 2020 that inspired nationwide racial justice protests.
The city of Louisville passed “Breonna’s Law” in June 2020, banning no-knock search warrants, and settled with Taylor’s family for $12m.
