Nov 17, 2023
Mistrial Declared For Cop Who Fired 10 Shots Into Breonna Taylor's Home
Mistrial Declared For Cop Who Fired 10 Shots Into Breonna Taylor's Home
- 11 minutes
A mistrial for the cop who fired ten
shots into Brianna Taylor's home.
In Louisville, Kentucky a mistrial
has been declared in the case of
former Louisville Metro Police Department
officer Brett Hankerson,
who was involved in the botch May 13 or
March 13,
[00:00:16]
2020 raid that resulted in
the death of Brianna Taylor.
Background, let's give some
background on his trial.
According to the Louisville
Courier-Journal, his trial began
on October 30 and a federal judge heard
testimony from around two dozen witnesses.
The Associated Press reported
that the 12-member jury told
[00:00:34]
District Judge Rebecca Grady Jennings
that they were at an impasse on Thursday
afternoon, of course,
this is according to People magazine.
Jennings asked the jurors to continue
deliberating, but the judge later said
there were elevated voices from
the jury room during deliberation.
[00:00:52]
Security officers or officials
visited the room, the AP reports.
Jurors said they were still deadlocked,
causing Jenny's to declare mistrial,
again that's according to People magazine.
When asked if federal
prosecutors will retry the case,
the Department of Justice spokesman
told ABC News that they are actively
[00:01:09]
considering all of their
available options.
That again is ABC, WHS, 11 News,
there's more in this case.
But Rayyvana,
I wanna bring this in this is a horrible,
absolutely disgusting situation for me.
First of all, they're still referring
to this person who murdered
[00:01:30]
this woman as a former police officer,
I am disgusted by that title.
How do you get to keep or be called former
police officer when you were part of
this ridiculous no knock warrant who
killed a woman who was sleep in her bed?
[00:01:45]
It's absolutely disgusting that we still
refer to this person in this manner.
There's nothing else we can refer to him
as other than former police officer.
What are you trying to
evoke out of people?
Rayyvana, what do you think?
>> Speaker 2: No, and that's an excellent
point that you just made because it is
[00:02:02]
meant to invoke a sense of he was carrying
out his duty and it's important for
it to be continuously framed
that way by his legal team.
Even the word former doesn't change the
connotation of what you're saying there,
you could just call him by his name.
[00:02:20]
But that being said,
the fact that this, and
I've been following this trial
because we are years and
years out from this horrible
murder of Breonna Taylor and
no justice has been served
against this man, individually.
[00:02:36]
Of course, her family did receive
a settlement, a large settlement, but
I mean, that's still not the type of
justice that they are hoping to achieve.
They wanna see this man behind bars for
what he did to Breonna Taylor.
And I've been following this trial
Pretty closely and the evidence that has
[00:02:54]
been presented to me, and I have a biased
perspective on this case, of course I do.
I want the Breonna Taylor's
family to get justice.
But if I'm looking at it from
a perspective where I'm just
evaluating the evidence
being brought forward,
[00:03:12]
to me it seems impenetrable,
like it is rock solid.
Other people on the scene were testifying
that there's no way he could have seen
through the windows that
had blackout curtains.
And somehow this jury, which only has
one black person on it mind you came to
[00:03:27]
the conclusion that they
couldn't come to a conclusion.
It's unfathomable to me.
And the judge did,
I'm probably getting this in a second,
asked them to continue considering.
But then just two hours later they
said they couldn't reach a conclusion.
[00:03:43]
I mean, it seems like something
funky is going on, or
there's people in the jury who
couldn't be objective members of
a jury in this case, or
maybe have a bad understanding of the law.
Maybe the prosecutors didn't
do their job on that part,
[00:04:00]
or the defense did a good job
at obfuscating what the law is.
I'm not sure we're not privy
to all that information.
And we are also not privy to how
many jurors were refusing to.
We don't know how many were
on each side of the issue.
We don't know how many
wanted to convict and
[00:04:16]
how many wanted to find him not guilty.
But just thinking of the way that
the process works, it could be 11 of them
wanted to convict and one didn't or
we could have the opposite.
There could be one very brave person
on the jury refusing to acquiesce
[00:04:32]
to 11 other people who wanted
to let him off on these charges.
We don't know but that's why I think it's
so important that they do retry this case.
And that's obviously
the wishes of the family.
And I wanna see that happen because
this man deserves to be punished for
[00:04:50]
what he did.
>> Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean,
you're absolutely right on this.
And I'm gonna say something both of
us been to law school, Rayyvana,
you and myself.
I think for me, I don't know how the
people I went to law school with are gonna
feel about this next comment,
but I'm gonna make it.
This is the very reason why I
don't like the idea that common
[00:05:09]
people are called to be on a jury.
I need people to understand the law
clearly defining, I don't need this idea.
So it could be a jury of your
peers with law degrees, right.
And I think that to me would sit better
because there's no way, like you said,
[00:05:24]
this was to me in my eyes,
a rock solid case and this was a home run.
But when you put the political leanings,
the beliefs and
the folk, what's the legal term?
Not the common person, but
the term I'm talking about the layperson,
[00:05:41]
ideas and views in it, then it's all sway.
And then people can be confused
about what the law is.
This is the difference between the judge
sitting over Donald Trump's trial in
New York versus a jury trial.
Donald Trump can ran all he wants.
This judge understand what's at state and
what laws are to be,
[00:05:58]
what are the measures of the laws and
I think that is a problem.
And you're also right about the fact
that her family is dead set on one
another trial.
Lonita Baker, her mother, or
the family's attorney, I'm sorry,
is confident this would not be the last
time Hankison is in a courtroom.
[00:06:14]
The attorney from the Department of
Justice did indicate that there is their
intention to retry Bret Hankison in
this case again, Baker said that.
A hearing is set for December 13 to
determine if the federal government will
bring Hankison to trial again.
[00:06:29]
This is, as a person who has lost
two brothers to the streets,
to violent deaths,
this is why people cannot put their
healing process with justice, right.
The Justice Department should not
be a part of your healing process.
[00:06:47]
Not at all, or your grieving process,
because every time that family has to deal
with this situation, it could affect how
they're moving forward with their lives.
And this is absolutely true when it comes
to black people dealing with cops as
the defendants,
we don't see justice enough to make
that a part of your grief system.
[00:07:05]
That just seems like a way
that's going to set you back.
Hankison and two other officers,
Myles Cosgrove and Jonathan Mattingly,
were involved in the fatal raid.
However, Kentucky Attorney General
Daniel Cameron said in a September
2020 conference that no charges
would be filed against Cosgrove and
[00:07:24]
Mattingly because our investigation
showed and the grand jury agreed.
Matingly and Cosgrove were justified in
the return of deadly fire after having
been fired upon by Kenneth Walker,
you bastard.
And the people of Kentucky
rejected this bastard.
[00:07:41]
And I'm saying that again
because the smile on his face,
the smirk in his black face, that
reminds me so much of Mitch McConnell.
And even though they
don't look alike at all.
I cannot take Daniel serious at all.
And I'm so glad the people of Kentucky
rejected him as an elected official and
[00:08:01]
he did not win an election.
And I hope that is a tad bit of solace for
the family of Breonna Taylor.
And not just the family,
but the community at large.
People saying we reject this idea where
you can't ask higher office when we've
[00:08:16]
already seen you're not capable of
delivering justice on an issue as simple
as this.
Rayyvana.
>> Yeah, and it's particularly
important that he was rejected in
a state that is otherwise fairly red and
he was running against a Democratic
governor and they rejected him outright.
[00:08:36]
And that is, I have the utmost
confidence that his decision
to not prosecute in this case,
those other two officers,
played a role in the rejection
of him at the ballot box.
[00:08:52]
That being said, I think that what you
said is interesting because when you see
just about juries for one second, because
when you are an attorney on a jury,
they are almost always gonna make
you the four person of the jury.
And I think that says something that they
give more credence to those individuals.
[00:09:11]
Obviously, it can't play out like that,
the way that the state
constitutions are written and
law degrees being prohibitively
expensive for a myriad of other reasons.
But I would say that I think that every
police officer should have to go to
law school.
I think every person who's charged with
enforcing the law should have to get
[00:09:28]
the same legal education that you and
I did because in a lot of places you could
be deputized with no education on the law,
no experience on the law.
And when we're in trials, right,
we turn to these police officers
[00:09:44]
as experts to testify in these cases and
they simply are not experts.
Six weeks of a law enforcement education
does not an expert on the law make.
It's absurd, and if we had a higher
bar for police in this country,
[00:10:00]
maybe we would have less police brutality.
Maybe we would have police officers who
actually have some sort of respect for
the law, which so
often we see they do not.
Maybe we would have a smaller, more
accountable police force, it's despicable.
[00:10:18]
But speaking of accountability,
that's what needs to happen here.
And as you said,
the family is confident that
the prosecutors are gonna retry the case.
And that's right now all we can hope for.
We can wait and
see what they're going to do, but
I would put my money on retrying it.
[00:10:34]
They've obviously spent a lot of time and
effort on this case.
I would be very surprised if they
just threw it by the wayside now.
But what we can do for
our part is continue to put pressure
on the prosecutors to retry this case so
that the media doesn't become silent and
[00:10:50]
they feel like they don't
have to do their jobs.
>> Right, and I think that's a good point.
Before we take this to break, I just wanna
remind people that this man actually shot
ten times into Breonna Taylor's apartment,
three of those bullets which went through
her wall and into her neighbor's house.
[00:11:08]
And I don't understand how every time
I hear one of these young boys in
North Carolina or anywhere in this
country are charged with shooting gun,
it's an attempted murder
charge associated with that.
He was not charged with that, he was
simply charged with wanting endangerment
of allegedly fired ten bullets, ten
bullets into this house that he couldn't
[00:11:25]
see into and
he got no attempted murder charges.
And of course some of that information
came from People Magazine.
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