Judge acquits 3 NYPD officers

On Friday morning, a state Supreme Court judge in Queens acquitted three officers in the shooting of Sean Bell, who died in a hail of 50 bullets on his wedding day.

There were no violent protests in the hours immediately after the conclusion of the case, as some had feared. Aside from a brief scuffle between police and protesters outside the courthouse, the response was muted.

At Manna’s restaurant in Harlem later in the day, two customers sat beneath a drawing of Rosa Parks and talked about the verdict. This was not the first time New York City police officers had been found not guilty in the shooting of an unarmed black man. But anger gave way to resignation a long time ago, they said.

“This is what usually happens,” said Cecily Jerrell, a retired teacher.

“After a while you get jaded,” said her younger brother Major Green, 48, an unemployed hotel worker. “The rioting thing is kind of old.”

Judge Arthur J. Cooperman, who decided the case without a jury, found Dets. Gescard Isnora and Michael Oliver not guilty of manslaughter and Marc Cooper not guilty of reckless endangerment in the death of Bell, 23, outside the Club Kalua in November 2006.

In his judgment, Cooperman said, there had been “inconsistencies in testimony among prosecution witnesses.” He also said he questioned the demeanor of certain witnesses on the stand and “the motive witnesses may have had to lie.”

“At times,” he concluded, “the testimony just didn’t make sense.”

Spectators in the packed courtroom gasped as the verdict was read, and Bell’s fiancee, Nicole Paultre-Bell, walked out.

As news reached scores of protesters outside, there were cries of outrage. “No, no, no!” an elderly woman yelled as tears streamed down her face. Another woman chanted through a loudspeaker: “NYPD: You can’t hide! We charge you with genocide!”

Shouting epithets against the police, demonstrators carried banners that read: “The People’s Verdict: Guilty.”

More than 100 officers had been dispatched to the courthouse, forming a human chain on the steps and keeping watch from nearby rooftops.

Cooper, who appeared with the other officers at a news conference, apologized. “I’d like to say sorry to the Bell family for the tragedy,” he said.

After the verdict, Bell’s family and fiancee went to his grave site on Long Island, while the Rev. Al Sharpton took to the airwaves, calling for a federal investigation into the shooting.

“The fight is far from over,” Sharpton said in a radio broadcast at his Harlem headquarters. He described the verdict as “an abortion of justice.”

Despite the fact that two of the officers involved in the shooting were black, to some New Yorkers, race was a key factor.

“Blue is one color; black and Latino is another,” said pastor Vernon Williams as he listened to Sharpton speak.

“The way the NYPD polices the city is according to race: They are more aggressive and more likely to approach a person as a [criminal] than as a citizen,” Williams said. “And that can have dangerous consequences.”

Queens Dist. Atty. Richard Brown said the trial indeed had raised questions about “current law enforcement practices and police-community relations -- issues that require careful examination.” The evidence, he said, had shown deficiencies in “supervision, tactical planning, communications and management accountability.”

The U.S. attorney’s office is conducting an independent review of the case. When that examination is completed, New York Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said, the department will weigh whether to take any disciplinary action against the three officers.

Some community activists have said the Bell shooting is just the latest example of excessive violence by police. And during the tense and emotional trial, attorneys painted widely divergent pictures of what led up to the shooting.

Through witness testimony and in closing statements, prosecutors suggested that the officers were ill-prepared and acted recklessly during the confrontation that began outside the strip club around 4 a.m.

After an argument with another person, Bell and his friends got into their car. Isnora approached with his gun drawn. Some witnesses testified that they did not hear the officers identify themselves.

Bell, who was driving, backed into Isnora’s legs, knocking him down. Isnora and the other officers unleashed a barrage of bullets, killing Bell and severely injuring his friends, Trent Benefield and Joseph Guzman.

Both have sued the city for damages.

The Bell case has been likened to the 1999 police shooting of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed black man gunned down when he reached for his cellphone. A judge acquitted the officers, prompting widespread and violent protests in the city.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who reached out to activists and the Bell family immediately after the shooting, said in a statement Friday that “there are no winners in a trial like this.”

“An innocent man lost his life, a bride lost her groom, two daughters lost their father, and a mother and a father lost their son. No verdict could ever end the grief that those who knew and loved Sean Bell suffer,” he said.

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louise.roug@latimes.com