A Queens 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. He said that prosecutors had failed to prove their case and that wounded friends of the slain man had given testimony that he did not believe.
The top-to-bottom acquittals of Detectives Gescard F. Isnora, Michael Oliver and Marc Cooper were delivered by Justice Arthur J. Cooperman in an essay form bearing little resemblance to a standard jury verdict, and were met momentarily with silence in court as spectators looked at one another to be sure they had grasped what he was saying.
The detectives, all but obscured behind a human wall of courthouse officers, finally seemed to exhale deeply, even crumple, with relief. Detective Oliver — who reloaded his gun to fire a total of 31 shots and helped catapult the shooting from tragic mistake to a symbol, for many, of police abuse of force and poor training — closed his eyes and 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 now investigate the case, and the Police Department is mulling internal charges. A $50 million lawsuit against the city, filed last year by Mr. Bell’s fiancée, who had two children with him, and the two men wounded in the shooting, may now begin moving forward.
The shooting of Mr. Bell, 23, outside a nightclub in Jamaica, Queens, early on Nov. 25, 2006, the morning of the day he was to be married, was the city’s latest crucible for distilling questions about police treatment of people of color and the use of excessive force on unarmed black men. The shooting lasted seconds, but offered a glimpse of what it is to live in a neighborhood where black men and women are stopped and frisked at a higher rate than elsewhere in the city.
But the case never became the racially charged lightning rod of its predecessors, like the case of Amadou Diallo, killed in 1999 in a hail of 41 shots. This was due in part to the race of the officers — two of the three on trial were black — and to the response of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who reached out to the victim’s family in a stark contrast to the response of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani after Mr. Diallo was killed.
Further, trial testimony showed that Mr. Bell may have played some role, however unwitting, in the shooting, as he was drunk by legal standards when he pressed down on the accelerator of his fiancée’s Nissan Altima and struck Detective Isnora in the leg in an attempt to flee.
Justice Cooperman, who heard the case without a jury in State Supreme Court in Queens, listed his reasons for throwing out much of the testimony from Mr. 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,” he said.
As for the detectives, the judge made it clear that he believed their versions of events over those of the young men involved, including Detective Isnora’s statement that he had overheard Mr. Bell’s friend Joseph Guzman twice say that he was going to get a gun.
“The court has found that the incident lasted just seconds,” Justice Cooperman said. “The officers responded to perceived criminal conduct; the unfortunate consequences of their conduct were tragic.”
But rather than call the shooting justified, the judge said that the prosecution failed to prove it was unjustified, as was its burden. Indeed, his ruling was far from approving of the detectives’ conduct during the undercover vice operation that night. “Questions of carelessness and incompetence must be left to other forums,” he said. He never mentioned the high number of shots fired, or the fact that Detective Oliver had fired 31 of them.
Similar statements came from the Queens district attorney, Richard A. Brown, whose office prosecuted the case. He said the trial “revealed significant deficiencies in, among other things, supervision, tactical planning, communications and management accountability — insufficiencies that need to be addressed.”
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who called the incident “inexplicable” and “excessive” in the days following the shooting, expressed sorrow for Mr. Bell’s family.
“There are no winners in a trial like this,” he said. “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.”
The verdict came 17 months to the day after five officers pointed their pistols at the car Mr. Bell was driving and opened fire. The shooting followed a confrontation between Mr. Bell and a stranger outside the Club Kalua, where Mr. Bell had attended his bachelor party. During the confrontation, Detective Isnora said, he heard the threat about getting the gun.
In the events that followed, Mr. Bell’s car struck the detective’s leg and, twice, a police van. Detective Isnora said he saw Mr. Guzman reach for his waistband, shouted “Gun” and fired. The three detectives who were brought to trial fired 46 of the 50 rounds, killing Mr. Bell and wounding Mr. Guzman and Trent Benefield, another friend of Mr. Bell’s.
The detectives each spoke briefly at a press conference at the Detectives Endowment Association on Friday afternoon, variously thanking God, their families, lawyers and Justice Cooperman. “This is the start of my life back,” said Detective Cooper, who seemed to be fighting back tears.
The United States Department of Justice issued a statement announcing its own investigation. “The Civil Rights Division and the United States attorney’s office have been monitoring the state’s prosecution of this case and, following the review of all the evidence, will take appropriate action if the evidence indicates a prosecutable violation of federal criminal civil rights statutes,” the statement said.
Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said an internal departmental investigation into the shooting, which could lead to a departmental trial and possible disciplinary actions up to termination, would be put on hold at the request of the federal authorities. This allows the Police Department, for the moment, to avoid the complex issue of meting out punishment to its own officers.
Mr. Guzman and Mr. Benefield left the courthouse without comment. Mr. Benefield — singled out by name in the verdict as giving testimony that contradicted the evidence — turned and shouted something back toward the officers guarding the building.
(Coincidentally, the judge paused in the reading of his verdict only once, to demand that a crying child be removed from the courtroom. It is unlikely that he had any idea that the child was Trent Benefield III.)
Mr. Bell’s parents, William and Valerie Bell, were sitting where they had been sitting, side by side, throughout the seven-week trial. Mrs. Bell had been looking toward the floor and blinking furiously during the verdict, and finally began to cry, covering her face while her husband stared straight ahead, looking at no one and shaking his head.
A woman sitting behind them broke the silence when she asked, “Did he just say ‘not guilty’?”
Court officers hurried the three detectives out a back door.
As news of the acquittals rippled through clots of supporters of the Bell family, Mr. and Mrs. Bell led a column of friends and relatives, including Mr. Bell’s fiancée, Nicole Paultre Bell, out of the courthouse. No one, including Mr. Sharpton, spoke, and the spectators on Queens Boulevard fell into a column and followed behind.
Mr. Brown, the district attorney, said he accepted the verdict, calling Justice Cooperman “one of this county’s most respected and learned jurists.”
“I accept his verdict and I urge all fair-minded individuals in this city to do the same,” he said.
He was asked if, in hindsight, he had any misgivings about the reading of the grand jury testimony of the three detectives from 2007 into the record during the trial. The readings were widely seen as something of a coup for the defense, with the detectives’ accounts of the panic and uncertainty surrounding the shooting coming across without the detectives having to undergo cross-examination.
“That was a trial decision that was made, I think appropriately made,” Mr. Brown said.
The lead prosecutor, Charles A. Testagrossa, an assistant district attorney, recalled criticism of the prosecution strategy of calling almost all the available witnesses, whether they were helpful or harmful to the prosecution.
“It’s very easy for people who are observing the trial to say, ‘Gee, you called this witness, and not this witness,’ ” he said. “If you think that criticism could have made us work any harder, be more committed to obtaining a conviction in this case, then you had a right to criticize us. But the fact of the matter is, knowing how hard all of the members of this team worked,” the criticism meant nothing.
Then he quoted one of his own witnesses, a stripper who appeared early in the trial: ” ‘It is what it is.’ ”
Justice Arthur J. Cooperman