http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,352566,00.html

NYPD Officers Acquitted of All Counts in 50-Shot Barrage That Killed Groom-to-Be

NEW YORK — Three detectives were acquitted of all charges Friday in the 50-shot killing of an unarmed man on his wedding day after a trial that that put the NYPD at the center of another highly charged case involving allegations of excessive firepower.

Justice Arthur Cooperman delivered the verdict in a Queens courtroom packed with spectators, including victim Sean Bell's fiancee and parents, as at least 200 people gathered outside the building.

The verdict provoked an outpouring of emotions: Bell's fiancee immediately walked out of the room. His mother cried. Gasps were heard throughout the room.

Shouts of "No!" and "Not guilty!" erupted in the crowd outside the courthouse as word of the verdict began to spread. Dozens of people in the crowd began crying after hearing the verdict.

Before announcing the verdict, the judge made a statement indicating that the police officers' version of events was more credible than the victims' version. "The people have not proved beyond a reasonable doubt that each defendant was not justified" in shooting the victims, Cooperman said.

Bell, a 23-year-old black man, was killed in a hail of gunfire outside a seedy strip club in Queens on Nov. 25, 2006 — his wedding day — as he was leaving his bachelor party with two friends.

Officers Michael Oliver, 36, and Gescard Isnora, 29, stood trial for manslaughter while Officer Marc Cooper, 40, was charged only with reckless endangerment. Two other shooters weren't charged. Oliver squeezed off 31 shots; Isnora fired 11 rounds; and Cooper shot four times.

A conviction on manslaughter could have brought up to 25 years in prison.

The case brought back painful memories of other NYPD shootings, such as the 1999 shooting of Amadou Diallo — an African immigrant who was gunned down in a hail of 41 bullets by police officers who mistook his wallet for a gun. The acquittal of the officers in that case created a storm of protest, with hundreds arrested after taking to the streets in demonstration.

The mood surrounding this case has been muted by comparison, although Bell's fiancee, parents and their supporters, including the Rev. Al Sharpton, have held rallies demanding that the officers — two of whom are black — be held accountable.

The officers, complaining that pretrial publicity had unfairly painted them as cold-blooded killers, opted to have the judge decide the case rather than a jury.

The nearly two-month trial was marked by deeply divergent accounts on the part of defense lawyers and prosecutors.

The defense painted the victims as drunken thugs who the officers believed were armed and dangerous. Prosecutors sought to convince the judge that the victims had been minding their own business, and that the officers were inept, trigger-happy aggressors.

In his closing arguments, prosecutor Charles Testagrossa alluded to the starkly different views of the shooting.

"If you are a police officer or sympathetic to police officers, the defendants are tragic heroes and the victims are thugs," he said. "If you are friends of the victims, then the defendants are murderers."

None of the officers took the witness stand in his own defense.

Instead, Cooperman heard transcripts of the officers testifying before a grand jury, saying they believed they had good reason to use deadly force. The judge also heard testimony from Bell's two injured companions, who insisted the maelstrom erupted without warning.

Both sides were consistent on one point: The utter chaos surrounding the last moments of Bell's life.

"It happened so quick," Isnora in his grand jury testimony. "It was like the last thing I ever wanted to do."

Bell's companions — Trent Benefield and Joseph Guzman — also offered dramatic testimony about the episode. Benefield and Guzman were both wounded; Guzman still has four bullets lodged in his body.

Referring to Isnora, Guzman said, "This dude is shooting like he's crazy, like he's out of his mind."

The victims and shooters were set on a fateful collision course by a pair of innocuous decisions: Bell's to have a last-minute bachelor party at Kalua Cabaret, and the undercover detectives' to investigate reports of prostitution at the club.

The party, according to Bell's friends, was boozy but uneventful. But the undercovers were jumpy.

"I felt uncomfortable," testified Detective Hispolito "Hip" Sanchez, who with Isnora posed as a patron that night. "I just didn't feel good about it."

As the club closed around 4 a.m., Sanchez and Isnora claimed they overheard Bell and his friends first flirt with women, then taunt a stranger who responded by putting his right hand in his pocket as if he had a gun. Guzman, they testified, said, "Yo, go get my gun" — something Bell's friends denied.

Isnora said he decided to arm himself, call for backup — "It's getting hot," he told his supervisor — and tail Bell, Guzman and Benefield as they went around the corner and got into Bell's car. He claimed that after warning the men to halt, Bell pulled away, bumped him and rammed an unmarked police van that converged on the scene with Oliver at the wheel.

The detective also alleged that Guzman made a sudden move as if he were reaching for a gun.

"I yelled 'Gun!' and fired," he said. "In my mind, I knew (Guzman) had a gun."

Benefield and Guzman testified that there were no orders. Instead, Guzman said, Isnora "appeared out of nowhere" with a gun drawn and shot him in the shoulder — the first of 16 shots to enter his body.

"That's all there was — gunfire," he said. "There wasn't nothing else."

With tires screeching, glass breaking and bullets flying, the officers claimed that they believed they were the ones under fire. Oliver responded by emptying his semiautomatic pistol, reloading, and emptying it again, as the supervisor dived for cover.

The truth emerged when the smoke cleared: There was no weapon inside Bell's blood-splattered car.

After an ambulance was summoned, the shaken detectives gathered in the middle of the street — a scene the supervisor described as "surreal."

"We were all in shock," he said. "We thanked God that none of us were hit and we were going home."

In closing arguments, defense attorneys accused prosecutors of building their case on the unreliable testimony of Bell's friends. They noted that Guzman and Benefield both have criminal records and $50 million lawsuits against the city.

The pair were part of "a parade of convicted felons, crack dealers and men who were not strangers to weapons," said James Culleton, Oliver's attorney.

A lawyer for Isnora, Anthony Ricco, portrayed his client as an unjustly vilified hero who had exercised "enormous restraint" before pulling the trigger. But Testagrossa depicted the detectives as cowboys who wildly overreacted to some harmless trash talk. He suggested Oliver was the worst offender.

"Thirty-one shots," the prosecutor said. "Thirty-one separate pulls of the trigger. ... Thirty-one separate decisions to use deadly force. Thirty-one opportunities to pause and reassess whether continuing firing was necessary.

"Thirty-one opportunities to save an innocent life."

If the three cops were white this would be a huge story.

Ummm, it is a huge story.

My father-in-law is a retired NYPD detective. When I asked him about this story he told me, "It's better to be judged by 12 than carried by 6."

Having blood on your hands is a really great feeling as well.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,352622,00.html

Sean Bell Supporters Angry About Detectives' Acquittal in Wedding Day Killing

NEW YORK — The wail that came up from the crowd was as if they heard that Sean Bell had died again.

"No!" they shouted, while dozens of people, wearing Bell's face on hats, T-shirts and buttons, burst into sobs.

The scene unfolded outside the courthouse Friday as three police officers were cleared of all charges in the 2006 shooting of Bell, who died in a hail of 50 bullets on his wedding day.

Hundreds of friends of Bell and others wanted vindication for what they called a racially motivated shooting, and they reacted with tears and explosive anger to the officers' acquittal.

Many people in the predominantly black crowd began reciting other cases where black New Yorkers were shot by police, and the officers, they said, got away with it.

"This was a disgrace, what happened today," shouted Calvin Hutton, a Harlem resident. "We prayed for a different result, but we got the same old bull——."

Inside the packed Queens courtroom, gasps could be heard when Judge Arthur Cooperman acquitted the officers. Bell's mother cried; her husband put his arm around her and shook his head. Bell's fiancee, Nicole Paultre Bell, left the courtroom immediately. Officer Michael Oliver, who fired the most shots, also cried.

"It hurts," said Paultre Bell's attorney, Michael Hardy. "If it didn't you wouldn't be human. Because it touches real lives. ... This is not over. This is not over."

A friend led a visibly upset shooting survivor Trent Benefield from the courthouse, with an arm firmly around his shoulders, while enraged people outside shouted "Murderers! Murderers!"

Scores of police officers formed lines in the middle of traffic to block the crowd from charging the courthouse. Some spectators briefly jostled with the officers right after the verdict was announced and several people rushed out of the courthouse, but the contact didn't become violent.

The crowd wore black T-shirts with Bell's face in a yellow circle in the middle, while other shirts read "Justice for Sean Bell." One group held a banner proclaiming, "50 Shots. 50 More Reasons We Need Revolution."

Dozens of people briefly began pushing and shoving each other as a crowd of hundreds started a processional following Bell's fiancee and Rev. Al Sharpton to their cars, on their way to Bell's gravesite. No one was hurt or arrested.

Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said, "We don't anticipate violence, but we are prepared for any contingency."

Despite the anger over the verdict, the protests were muted compared with past verdicts where officers were cleared in police shootings of black men. Several factors contributed to this, including improved race relations in the city in recent years and the fact that two of the officers are black.

Patrick Lynch, president of the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, said the judge sent a message to officers that "when you're in front of the bench, that you will get fairness." But he said of the case: "there's no winners, there's no losers. We still have a death that occurred."

William Hardgraves, 48, an electrician from Harlem, brought his 12-year-old son and 23-year-old daughter to hear the verdict. "It could have been my son, it could have been my daughter" shot like Bell that night, he said.

He didn't know what result he had expected.

"I hoped it would be different this time. They shot him 50 times," Hardgraves said. "But of course, it wasn't."

I'd have a lot more sympathy for the cops in this case if they were, yanno, uniformed, and there wasn't any ambiguity as to how well they identified themselves. If I recall correctly, the driver was trying to get away, and in the process appeared to threaten to or attempted to ram the officers. That would be a reasonable response to unindentified armed persons you thought attempted to do you harm.

I'm pretty sure there's already a thread about this on here.

i thought so but i couldn't locate it.

Anything that puts Al Sharpton in the spotlight makes me

I agree. I think most people would have reacted in a similar way as Mr. Bell did.

I guess monday morning quarterbacking what they felt like was a deadly situation is a great feeling as well. If one of the Officers yells "gun" what are you going to do when you start hearing gun fire? You don't know where it is comming from. Your adrenaline goes off the charts and all you know is someone is shooting and they could be shooting at you. One of the guys in the car had already made threats about pulling a gun. I get a little pissed when people make stupid comments about a job they know nothing about. It is great feeling to know when you need an Officer you can call 911 and that Officer will respond. It is real easy to criticize the job they do afterwards.



And back to my original post, if this had been three white officers the media coverage would be different. The protest in the streets would be different. The entire situation would be different. That is what I meant, by it would be a huge story. It may be the lead story on the nightly news, which makes it a huge story. I was talking more of the riots in LA type huge.

Please. I've defended cops in N+D before, but 50 shots is ridiculous. One of the cops stopped to reload, for Christ's sake.

I'm not trying to "monday morning quarterback," I'm saying that the cops are only thinking of themselves. "Carried by six, judged by twelve"--what about the guy you just killed who was going to be married? What about his family? There's no mention of the real consequence of the event on their part--that an innocent man was killed-- and that's not right at all.

*fixed

/thread

*To shoot and be acquitted.

I hope one day you need an Officer to save your life.

edit: not literally, but you get my point.

We should consult LW or another military person on standard ROEs, but generally, one fires until the target falls down, or otherwise stops moving. If you intend to kill the person, does it matter if you do it excessively? If the car is in motion, how can you be certain that the individual is no longer a threat?

Are police supposed to intend to kill a person, or to arrest a person?

There is such a thing as "excessive force", even when the suspect poses a threat.

it is taught at the police academies across America that when drawing your weapon it is a circumstance of life and death. You are taught to aim to kill. Not wound. This is the reality and in a mobile fashion, reloading a clip is common. Not excessive. I was not there so I am torn on this subject matter totally. I find it standard procedure within the situation that occurred but I also find it excessive.