Judge Sentences Ex-Officer in Breonna Taylor Raid to Nearly 3 Years in Prison

A federal judge in Kentucky on Monday sentenced a former Louisville police officer involved in the fatal raid of Breonna Taylor’s home to nearly three years in prison, in a sharp rebuke to the Trump administration, which had requested he serve only one day behind bars.

Last year, a federal jury in Kentucky convicted the former officer, Brett Hankison, of one count of violating Ms. Taylor’s civil rights by using excessive force in discharging several shots through Ms. Taylor’s window during a botched drug raid in 2020. Even though none of the 10 shots he fired hit her, Mr. Hankison, who is white, was the only officer to be charged for his actions during the botched operation.

The lingering bitterness surrounding Ms. Taylor’s death, and a renewed sense of injustice roused by the Trump administration’s extraordinarily lenient sentencing request, spilled over into protests outside the federal courthouse in Louisville in the hours before the sentencing.

Last week, Harmeet K. Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, asked the judge in the case, Rebecca Grady Jennings, to sentence Mr. Hankison to a single day in prison — essentially the brief time he had served when he was charged, and three years of supervised release.

The request was intended to send the message that the department intends to abandon the department’s longstanding efforts to address racial disparities in policing — and to reorient the civil rights division to pursue President Trump’s culture war agenda at the expense of its founding mission of confronting race-based discrimination.

Judge Jennings, of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Kentucky, took issue with department’s extraordinary sentencing request. But she also decided against a long sentence, settling on a punishment far short of the maximum sentence of life in prison allowable by law.

Sentencing requests are typically filed by career prosecutors who worked on the case. The filing last week was signed by Ms. Dhillon, a political appointee who is a veteran Republican Party activist with close ties to Mr. Trump, and one of her deputies.

Shortly after the department made its request public, the family’s legal team issued a statement describing Ms. Taylor’s mother, Tamika Palmer, as “heartbroken and angry.”

Two other officers, also white, fired the fatal shots in the raid, but neither was charged.