If you hear the name Brett Hankison, it probably won’t ring a bell. Breonna Taylor, on the other hand, will start alarms ringing after she was killed by police who raided her house at night looking for a person who wasn’t there, starting a series of events that ended in Taylor’s death.

The series of events that played out on March 13, 2020, was essentially classic, a timeline that was certain to occur and, eventually or worse, end in the death of either innocent people or cops. This time, it was Breonna Taylor who was killed.

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.

Inside Taylor’s apartment was Kenneth Walker, not Jamarcus Glover. And Walker had a legal gun, which he grabbed when he heard people breaking into the apartment. Who wouldn’t? It was dark. Someone was breaking in. He had no clue who they were, and so he did what any person who didn’t want to die would do. He fired.

The police returned fire. They didn’t hit Walker, but they did hit Taylor, fatally wounding her. The injustice is staggering. She was innocent, she was unarmed, and she was gunned down in her own home.

So what’s any of this got to do with a cop named Hankison?

Hankison “shot blindly into Breonna Taylor’s apartment from dozens of feet outside in the parking lot.” He fired 10 shots, three of which passed through the wall and slammed into a neighboring apartment, where a pregnant woman lived with her son and partner.

When he heard shots fired, he reacted. Poorly. Foolishly. Dangerously. Wrongly. He didn’t harm anyone with his shots, but he could have.

The Louisville police department fired him in June 2020, and the termination letter said that his actions that night were “a shock to the conscience.”

Kentucky state prosecutors brought a wanton endangerment case against Hankison, but a state jury acquitted him of the charges in March 2022. Federal prosecutors obtained a civil rights indictment against Hankison, claiming that he had violated Taylor’s civil rights through the use of excessive force.

The first federal trial ended in a hung jury. The Biden Department of Justice tried him again and secured a conviction in November.

Hankison was fired as a cop, as he never should have been a cop in the first place. He went through a state criminal trial and was acquitted. But this was the Breonna Taylor case, so naturally the feds were not going to let it rest without a conviction, no matter what. And it took them two trials, but they finally got their piece of Brett Hankison. And now the new head of the DOJ Office of Civil Rights, Harmeet Dillon, put in her sentence memo.

In her filing requesting a one-day sentence, Dhillon argued that the “jury’s verdict will almost certainly ensure that defendant Hankison never serves as a law enforcement officer again and will also likely ensure that he never legally possesses a firearm again.”

In other words, he’s suffered enough.

Federal sentencing is based on the factors set forth in 18 USC § 3553, including the parsimony clause, that the sentence be “sufficient, but not greater than necessary” to accomplish the purposes set forth.

(A) to reflect the seriousness of the offense, to promote respect for the law, and to provide just punishment for the offense;
(B) to afford adequate deterrence to criminal conduct;
(C) to protect the public from further crimes of the defendant; and
(D) to provide the defendant with needed educational or vocational training, medical care, or other correctional treatment in the most effective manner;

Does one day serve the purposes set forth in the statute? Is it sufficient, but not greater than necessary? Would anyone know or care, but for the fact that this was the notorious Breonna Taylor case and cops must be punished?

David French offers a peculiar take on Dhillon’s contention that a sentence of one day is sufficient for Hankison.

It’s hard to read those words — dripping with sympathy for an officer who wrongly used deadly force, endangering innocent people in two different apartments — at the same time that the Trump administration has been sending immigrants who’ve been convicted of no crimes at all into indefinite confinement in brutal and inhumane conditions overseas.

Is there some nexus between the Hankison case and the Trump Administration’s brutal treatment of immigrants (and others)? Should OCR demand a harsher sentence for Hankison because Stephen Miller hates immigrants?

There’s a strong argument to be made that the federal prosecution following the state acquittal, in conflict with the Petite Policy, would never have happened but for the fact that this was the notorious Breonna Taylor killing. Other than George Floyd, no case better captured the zeitgeist of the moment.

But the fact that Harmeet Dhillon has chosen not to go for the max, not to be as “brutal and inhumane” as Trump is toward immigrants, is the appropriate sentence for this scared, incompetent and stupid cop who did wrong but didn’t kill Taylor or harm anyone else. Maybe the better question isn’t whether the “sympathy” toward Hankison is wrong, but whether the same showing of mercy and leniency will be shown to others who didn’t wear a badge when they fired ten bullets into an apartment.