Breonna Taylor’s mother, Tamika Palmer, has spoken out following the conviction of a former Louisville police officer involved in the botched 2020 raid that led to her daughter’s death.
Brett Hankison was found guilty of violating Breonna Taylor’s civil rights by a jury on Friday. The verdict came just hours after they acquitted Hankison on a second charge of violating the civil rights of three of Taylor’s neighbors, whose nearby apartment was also hit by gunfire during the raid.
It was the first conviction of a Louisville police officer who was involved in the deadly March 2020 raid, which resulted in four officers being charged by the U.S. Department of Justice for violating Taylor’s civil rights. Following the verdict, Palmer celebrated with friends outside the federal courthouse.
“It took a lot of time. It took a lot of patience. It was hard. The jurors took their time to really understand that Breonna deserved justice,” she told reporters, according to the Associated Press. “They stayed the course,” she added of prosecutors, who retried the case after Hankison’s first federal trial ended in a mistrial last year when the jury was unable to reach a unanimous decision after deliberating for several days.
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“I’m just glad to be on the other side,” Palmer said. “Now, I just want people to keep saying Breonna Taylor’s name.”
Bernice King, the daughter of Martin Luther King Jr., called the verdict “a long-awaited moment of accountability.”
“While it cannot restore Breonna to her family, it represents a crucial step in the pursuit of justice and a reminder that no one should be above the law,” King said in a social media post on Friday night.
Taylor’s death sparked racial injustice protests nationwide. Prosecutors accused Hankison of acting recklessly, firing 10 shots into doors and a window where he couldn’t see a target.
Hankison “violated one of the most fundamental rules of deadly force: If they cannot see the person they’re shooting at, they cannot pull the trigger,” prosecutors said in closing arguments.
But Hankison and his lawyers argued throughout the trial that he was acting to protect his fellow officers after Taylor’s boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, fired on them when they broke down Taylor’s door with a battering ram.
Hankison fired 10 shots into Taylor’s glass door and windows during the raid, which were covered with blinds and curtains, prosecutors said. Several of the rounds traveled into Taylor’s neighbor’s apartment, where three people were at the time. None of the 10 rounds hit anyone. Taylor was in the hallway at the time of the shootout.
Plainclothes officers were executing a warrant related to Taylor’s ex-boyfriend, suspected of drug activity, when they forced entry into her apartment. Although he was not there, her current boyfriend, Walker, believed an intruder was breaking in and fired a single shot, striking an officer in the leg, leading three officers to respond with gunfire.
During closing arguments on Wednesday, Hankison’s attorneys contended that he had acted appropriately in a “very tense, very chaotic environment” that lasted approximately 12 seconds.
The conviction against Hankison carries a maximum sentence of life in prison. He will be sentenced on March 12 by U.S. District Judge Rebecca Grady Jennings.
Neither of the officers who shot Taylor were charged in Taylor’s death. Federal and state prosecutors have said those officers were justified in returning fire, since Taylor’s boyfriend shot at them first.