By Aldgra Fredly
Contributing Writer
A federal judge on Monday sentenced a former Louisville police officer to 33 months in prison for violating the civil rights of Breonna Taylor during the 2020 no-knock raid that led to her death.
Brett Hankison will also serve three years of supervised probation after his prison term. The start date of his sentence and the facility where he will be held will be determined by the U.S. Bureau of Prisons.
District Judge Rebecca Grady Jennings delivered the sentence after federal prosecutors recommended that Hankison be given time served, which would amount to one day in prison.
Jennings rejected the request, saying that imposing no prison time on Hankison would be inappropriate and would undermine the jury’s guilty verdict reached in November 2024.
“This sentence will not and cannot be measured against Ms. Taylor’s life and the incident as a whole,” the judge said.
Hankison was found guilty of violating Taylor’s civil rights after firing 10 shots during the botched raid at her apartment, though none of his shots struck anyone. Last year, his federal civil rights trial ended in a mistrial after the jury failed to reach a unanimous verdict.

Civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who represents Taylor’s family, said they had hoped for a tougher sentence, noting that the jury’s verdict against Hankison “deserved to be met with real accountability.”
“While today’s sentence is not what we had hoped for — nor does it fully reflect the severity of the harm caused — it is more than what the Department of Justice sought,” Crump said in a statement.
At the sentencing, Hankison apologized to Taylor’s family and friends, saying that he would have acted differently had he known about issues with the preparation of the search warrant.
“I never would have fired my gun,” Hankison said in a brief statement to the court.
Hankison and two other officers carried out a no-knock raid on Taylor’s apartment in March 2020 as part of a drug investigation targeting her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, who was a suspect.
During the raid, Walker fired a shot that struck one of the officers in the leg, explaining later that he had acted under the belief that intruders were breaking in. The officers returned fire, and several bullets struck and killed Taylor.
Hankison fired 10 shots during the encounter, and while none of them struck anyone, prosecutors argued that his actions violated Taylor’s civil rights by firing into doors and windows without a clear view of a target. The other two officers were not charged, as prosecutors deemed their return fire justified.
Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this report.