(Reuters) – A Kentucky jury on Friday acquitted a police officer of violating the civil rights of the neighbors of Breonna Taylor, a Black woman whose 2020 shooting death by the officer sparked a wave of racial justice protests, ABC News reported.
However, the jury remained deadlocked late on Friday on whether former Louisville police officer Brett Hankison violated Taylor’s civil rights, and they were continuing deliberations, according to ABC.
After-hours calls to the U.S. District Court of the Western District of Kentucky, to the federal prosecutors overseeing the case and to Hankison’s lawyer were not immediately returned.
The killing of Taylor, along with other 2020 killings – including George Floyd in Minneapolis and Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia – sparked outrage and galvanized protests across the U.S. and around the globe that summer.
Hankison’s first civil rights trial ended in a mistrial almost a year ago.
He is on trial for civil rights violations for allegedly using excessive force.
Hankison, who is white and who prosecutors said fired 10 bullets that did not strike anyone during the botched raid on Taylor’s apartment, was acquitted by a state court in 2022 in a separate trial, in which he was accused of putting Taylor’s neighbors in danger by firing his weapon.
Of the three officers who fired their weapons, only Hankison faced criminal charges. Kentucky’s Attorney General Daniel Cameron did not recommend charges for them, and the grand jury did not indict them.
Taylor, a 26-year-old emergency medical technician, was asleep with her boyfriend on March 13, 2020, when police conducted a no-knock raid and burst into her apartment.
Police wanted to search the home in connection with a drug investigation in which Taylor’s ex-boyfriend, who did not live with Taylor at that time, was a suspect.
After police broke down Taylor’s door, her new boyfriend, fearing a break-in and saying he did not hear police identify themselves, fired one shot from a handgun that wounded an officer. That officer and another returned fire. Six shots struck Taylor, killing her.
(Reporting by Brad Brooks in Colorado; Editing by William Mallard)
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