Calls for Change Abound After Diallo Verdict

New demands for social justice, law enforcement reforms and a federal inquiry echoed from pulpits and city streets Sunday in the aftermath of the acquittal of four police officers in the shooting death of Amadou Diallo.

Meanwhile, one of the jurors said race never played a part in the verdict.

Helen Harder, 71, a retiree from the Albany suburb of Delmar, said the verdicts were the only possible outcome in the white officers’ shooting of the unarmed black man “because the prosecution didn’t prove its case. That’s the big thing.”

She said that when she was chosen to sit on the jury, she expected, based on what she had read in the newspapers, “that the verdict would come out that the cops were guilty of something--not murder, but something.

“But when we put it all together in the jury room, that’s not the way it came out. And everybody was in perfect agreement,” she said. The jurors ruled out the two second-degree murder charges “immediately,” she added.

More than 1,000 people held a peaceful prayer vigil outside the United Nations, where activist the Rev. Al Sharpton hoped to bring the case to international attention. Some in the crowd wore signs reading: “Go ahead and shoot. I’m black so it must be justified.”

In what was billed as a day of prayer, political leaders and activists joined Sharpton in criticizing the Friday verdicts as inappropriate for a case in which police fired 41 bullets and hit Diallo 19 times, only to discover afterward that he was unarmed.

Afterward, about 450 people, accompanied by a phalanx of police, marched to City Hall. Police said there was one arrest for disorderly conduct and one summons issued for using a megaphone without a permit.

The four officers still face a departmental inquiry and possible federal charges if U.S. Atty. Gen. Janet Reno finds evidence that Diallo’s civil rights were violated.