Rachel Moran, professor at the University of St. Thomas School of Law, recently spoke with The Christian Science Monitor on the sentencing of the police officer who shot Breonna Taylor.
A federal judge sentenced a former Louisville, Kentucky, police officer to 33 months in prison, with three years of supervised release, for his role in a botched raid that accidentally killed Breonna Taylor five years ago.
The sentence for Brett Hankison, which came after the U.S. Department of Justice had suggested a punishment of one day in prison, closes the book on a case that helped spark nationwide calls for racial justice and police reform. But it leaves behind lingering concerns over the difficulties in bringing charges against individual officers in excessive force cases, as well as how politically polarized the debate over police reform in America has become. …
“You could say this is a man who, outside of his policing job, has not posed a threat of harm to the public, so why should he be in prison?” says Rachel Moran, a police accountability expert at the University of St. Thomas School of Law.
“But as a symbolic matter, the DOJ is well aware that they’re also implicitly saying, ‘We do not want to make an example of this officer, and, in fact, we are doing the opposite’ by requesting a one-day sentence,” she adds.