Candis Little/Judge Acquits Detectives in 50-shot killing of Bell/04/30/08/11:08p.m./ethnic conflict

On last Friday, you could find the story of the disapproval of the Sean Bell’s murder case everywhere on the news. All over New York City, people were showing their hurt and anger toward the judge’s decision to acquit the three officers that are responsible for Bell’s murder. 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. 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.
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 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 even though some say that the black officers turned on their own kind at a time of justice. But rather than call the shooting justified, the judge said that the prosecution failed to prove it was unjustified, as was its burden.