President Donald Trump revealed over the last week that he's willing to use some incongruences baked into American law to his advantage, and that threatens to upend America's tradition of civil rights, according to one conservative columnist.
The most stunning example of Trump's willingness to use American law against itself happened when the Department of Justice recommended a one-day sentence for the police officer who killed Breonna Taylor while she slept in her home in 2020, columnist David French argued in an op-ed for The New York Times.
French argued that Taylor's case exposed a significant gap in America's self-defense laws. Taylor's boyfriend at the time, Kenneth Walker, was a legal gun owner. Kentucky's "castle doctrine" law also gave him the right to use lethal force if he had "reason to believe" someone was unlawfully entering their home.
Walker testified after Taylor's killing that police never announced themselves before entering their home. Fearing a home invasion, Walker fired his gun and hit an officer. The police also had legal justification to return fire, which revealed one of the "terrible quirks" in American law because the two parties in a "legal gunfight," French argued.
But that's not how Trump's Department of Justice saw the case.
Instead, Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, argued that Hankison had suffered enough. The argument effectively placed Hankison's indiscriminate firing of a weapon above Taylor's safety and Walker's right to self-defense.
"There is nothing inherently wrong with a new administration evaluating the actions of the old, but if that evaluation is resulting in perverse miscarriages of justice — as it is in Hankison’s case — then the very purpose of the civil rights division is being subverted, right before our eyes," French wrote.
"Civil rights laws are designed in part to protect innocent citizens — including, of course, innocent citizens from minority communities — from unjust government officials," French continued. "Here, the legal world is turned upside down. The Justice Department is using its civil rights division to protect an unjust government official who violated the civil rights of an innocent individual."
