'Lurking ... beneath the surface': How Breonna Taylor will affect trial of former Louisville officer
LOUISVILLE, Ky. — This week, for the first time since her death nearly two years ago, someone will stand trial for the circumstances surrounding the shooting of Breonna Taylor.
The only catch: The criminal charges the jury will consider aren't for killing Taylor; they're for endangering her neighbors.
Even so, Taylor's presence is expected to loom large over the trial of Brett Hankison, the former Louisville Metro Police officer who was fired for "blindly" shooting into her apartment the night she died.
The wanton endangerment trial for the ex-detective begins Tuesday with the individual questioning of potential jurors, and is expected to last into March.
Hankison has pleaded not guilty to three counts of wanton endangerment, a class D felony that is one step above a misdemeanor.
He fired 10 shots through a covered patio door and window, and while none of those shots hit Taylor or anyone else, some penetrated into an adjacent apartment unit with three people inside.
No one has been charged with causing Taylor's death.
Taylor, a 26-year-old emergency room technician, was fatally shot by plainclothes Louisville officers just before 1 a.m. on March 13, 2020, as they attempted to execute a search warrant.
When officers used a battering ram to force open the apartment's front door, Taylor's boyfriend fired one shot from his handgun, hitting Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly in the thigh and prompting Hankison, Mattingly and Detective Myles Cosgrove to return fire 32 times.
Taylor was struck six times by Mattingly and Cosgrove and died in her hallway.
Hankison was fired after a former interim chief called the rounds he shot through the covered door and window "a shock to the conscience."
"Arrest the cops who killed Breonna Taylor" became a common refrain in the street of Louisville and on social media in 2020, alongside wanted posters featuring Hankison, Cosgrove and Mattingly.
'It's not something that you just finish': Activists mark year of Breonna Taylor protests
Will Breonna Taylor help or hurt Brett Hankison's case?
But how, exactly, that connection to Taylor will affect jury selection and Hankison's trial remains to be seen.
"That will be sort of lurking not very far beneath the surface," said Samuel Marcosson, a law professor at the University of Louisville. "But whether it's something that Hankison is up against, or whether it's something that ultimately works in his favor, is hard to say."
Some potential jurors may see this trial as a proxy for the homicide charges they would have liked to seen filed against the officers, Marcosson said, while others may feel strongly they acted appropriately the night Taylor died.
Legal experts interviewed by The Courier Journal, part of the Paste BN network, say juries generally are reluctant to convict police officers, often giving them the benefit of the doubt in situations involving use of force on the job.
But the nation — and Louisville, too — has spent much of the last two years grappling with racial justice protests and widespread demands for police reform, and there have been several recent high-profile convictions of officers or would-be vigilantes for the deaths of Black Americans such as George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery.
Jury selection will be key in this trial, the experts told The Courier Journal. Both the prosecution and defense will want to carefully investigate how potential jurors feel about not just Taylor's death, but police in general.
"Everyone that comes into the courtroom is going to have heard something about this," attorney Brian Butler said. "You want to know, first of all, what they know. And you have to question them individually about what they know because you don't want what one person says poisoning everyone else.
"And then the really difficult question is not that they know about it, or have they heard something about it, but have they formed an opinion about it?"
Stew Mathews, Hankison's attorney, declined to comment, saying he was focusing on trial preparation.
Jury selection: race, policing and perception of Taylor
Marcosson predicted race will be an issue from the outset, as he anticipates Hankison's defense will try to strike as many potential jurors of color as possible.
"Whatever we may think of that, that is a common strategy in cases where race is an issue at the forefront, where one side or the other, prosecution or defense, tries to get a jury that they perceive will be favorable," he said. "One of the indicia, one of the markers, that they believe will help to produce a jury that is more favorably disposed to their side is the race of the jurors who ended up on the panel."
Taylor was a Black woman and Hankison is a white man. In Louisville, her death set off racial justice protests that lasted for more than 180 consecutive days in 2020.
A November 2021 CityView poll provided insights into many Louisville residents' feelings on police, Taylor's death and more:
- About 45% of Louisville residents have less faith in police because of Taylor's killing, while just 7% said they have more.
- Residents in Louisville were split on whether local police "use force only when necessary," with 44% saying they agreed, while 43% said they didn't.
- Black and white residents were split on several key questions, with Black residents being more likely than white residents to say police used force when unnecessary and that police are racist.
Even with some Louisvillians' increasing weariness of police, Frank Mascagni III, a Louisville defense attorney, said the prosecution has a tough burden.
"Not to prove wanton endangerment," he said, "but to prove it to the satisfaction of 12 jurors unanimously that a police officer was not justified in the actions he took."
Between 2005 and June 2021, 142 non-federal law enforcement officers were arrested for murder or manslaughter, according to Philip Stinson, a Bowling Green State University criminology professor who tracks police misconduct.
Seven of those officers were convicted of murder, 37 others were convicted of lesser offenses and 53 were acquitted. Forty-five criminal cases remained ongoing as of June 2021.
But that doesn't mean a conviction of Hankison is impossible.
"If you had asked me this in the first 40 years of my practice, I would say I would be inclined to believe that he would be acquitted," Mascagni said. "But in view of the last two years of focus on police inappropriate actions, if there ever was a time he would be found guilty, it would be this time in American history."
The police officers who killed Floyd and Daunte Wright while on-duty have both been convicted for the slayings within the last year, but that doesn't necessarily make them a bellwether for Hankison's trial.
Those deaths, unlike Taylor's, were caught on camera, and, Marcosson said, they were "quite egregious."
"It's hard to say whether they really represent a trend or just outlier cases in which the normal deference (to police), there was simply no room for it to operate," he said. "This case, I suspect, will be more of an indicator. … This seems to be the kind of case in which deference has operated in the past to result in an officer being acquitted and sometimes not even being charged.
"If Hankison is convicted, I think it would start to show that wall that has protected police officers from facing and being convicted of charges really has started to come down somewhat."
'No faith' in the prosecution
While the lead prosecutor in the case, Assistant Attorney General Barbara Maines Whaley, has a solid reputation as a career prosecutor in the legal community, those still waiting for justice for Taylor say they have "no faith" in anyone from Daniel Cameron's office.
Cameron's office became the special prosecutor in 2020 after Jefferson County Commonwealth's Attorney Tom Wine recused himself from the case.
Cameron's office only presented grand jurors with potential charges against Hankison, saying Mattingly and Cosgrove were justified in returning fire — a decision that was widely criticized, including by some of the grand jurors themselves.
Tamika Palmer, Taylor's mother, said a conviction of Hankison would not equate to accountability for her 26-year-old daughter's death.
"Now, would it be nice if there was a conviction that came with a sentence that forces Brett Hankison to live in a prison cell?" she said in a statement. "Yes, it would. But even though this should be a slam-dunk conviction, we have no faith in Daniel Cameron's office to get it done."
Sam Aguiar, an attorney for Taylor's family, echoed Palmer's sentiments, saying there's not enough evidence to acquit Hankison.
"From start to finish, the Attorney General's Office has shown absolutely no motivation to get any sort of justice for Breonna Taylor," Aguiar said. "I think this is going to be another situation where it becomes clear that the Attorney General's Office has an agenda to protect the police.
"If the Attorney General's Office doesn't get a conviction here, then that's 100% on them."
Tyra Walker, an activist and co-chair of the Kentucky Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, criticized Cameron's handling of the case.
The killers of Floyd, Wright and Arbery were all convicted, she said, but the men who killed Taylor won't even stand trial for her death.
"All of those, they have gotten a conviction," Walker said. "And here? They won't even be tried, but that's due to … not even giving all the accurate facts for the grand jury to make a solid decision on whether or not they should be tried for the murder of Breonna Taylor."
The Attorney General's Office did not return multiple Courier Journal requests for comment for this story.
Additionally, Jeffrey Sexton, an attorney representing Hankison's alleged victims in a civil suit against Louisville police officers, said his clients had been advised not to speak to the news media ahead of the trial.
Steve Romines, an attorney representing Taylor's boyfriend Kenneth Walker in a civil lawsuit against officers, also declined to comment.
Officer Beth Ruoff, a spokesperson for Louisville Metro Police, said the department is "unable to comment on pending judicial proceedings."
Reach Tessa Duvall on Twitter: @TessaDuvall.