N.Y. officers acquitted in wedding-day killing

NEW YORK — A judge on Friday acquitted three detectives charged in the shooting of Sean Bell, who died on his wedding day in a hail of 50 police bullets. The judge said that prosecutors had failed to prove their case and that wounded friends of the slain man had given testimony he did not believe.

The acquittals of Detectives Gescard Isnora, Michael Oliver and Marc Cooper were delivered by Justice Arthur Cooperman and met momentarily with silence as spectators looked at one another to be sure they had grasped what he was saying.

"The prosecution has not proven beyond a reasonable doubt that each defendant was not justified" in using deadly force, Cooperman said.

A woman sitting behind Bell's parents, William and Valerie Bell, broke the silence when she asked, "Did he just say 'not guilty'?"

Oliver — who reloaded his pistol to fire a total of 31 shots — cried.

Except for a few scuffles outside the Queens Criminal Court building and shouted displays of disbelief and outrage, the day passed peacefully amid calls for calm delivered by the mayor, the police commissioner and other officials. Still, the Rev. Al Sharpton, a spokesman for the Bell family, called for street protests and said people should get themselves arrested, "whether it is on Wall Street, the judge's house or at 1 Police Plaza."

Legal hurdles remain for the officers. Federal authorities said they would investigate the case, and the police department is considering internal charges. A $50 million lawsuit against the city may begin moving forward. The suit was filed last year by the two men wounded in the shooting and by Bell's fiancée, who had two children with him.

The shooting of Bell, 23, outside a nightclub in Jamaica, Queens, early on Nov. 26, 2006, the morning of the day he was to be married, was the city's latest crucible for questions about police treatment of people of color and the use of excessive force on unarmed black men.

But the case never became the racially charged lightning rod of its predecessors, because two of the three on trial were black. Further, trial testimony showed that Bell may have played some role in the shooting, because he was drunk by legal standards when he pressed down on the accelerator of his fiancée's Nissan Altima and struck Isnora in the leg in an attempt to flee.

Cooperman, who heard the case without a jury, listed his reasons for throwing out much of the testimony from Bell's group, including the number of times that witnesses were caught changing their story on the stand and the witnesses who had interests in the outcome because of the lawsuit against the city. Those issues, criminal backgrounds and the demeanor of the mostly young men on the witness stand "had the effect of eviscerating the credibility of those prosecution witnesses," Cooperman said.

The judge made it clear he believed the detectives' versions of events over those of the young men involved, including Isnora's statement that he had overheard Bell's friend Joseph Guzman twice say he was going to get a gun.

But rather than call the shooting justified, the judge said the prosecution failed to prove it was unjustified, as was its burden. "Questions of carelessness and incompetence must be left to other forums," he said.

The verdict came 17 months to the day after five officers pointed their pistols at the car Bell was driving and fired. The shooting followed a confrontation between Bell and a stranger outside the Club Kalua, where Bell had attended his bachelor party. During the confrontation, Isnora said, he heard the threat about getting the gun.

In the events that followed, Bell's car struck the detective's leg and, twice, a police van. Isnora said he saw Guzman reach for his waistband, shouted "Gun" and fired. The three detectives who were brought to trial fired 46 of the 50 rounds, killing Bell and wounding Guzman and Trent Benefield, another friend of Bell's.