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.