50 Shots: NYC Cops who Killed Unarmed Black Man on Wedding Day Face Trial

from the Associated Press and Reuters

Three undercover police detectives on trial in the death of an unarmed man killed in a hail of gunfire on his wedding day were reckless and trigger happy, prosecutors argued Monday. They also said police were careless and desperate to make an arrest because their vice unit was about to be disbanded, a prosecutor said on Monday.

Sean Bell, 23, who had been at a bachelor party on the night before his wedding, was killed outside a Queens strip club in the early hours of Nov. 25. Two of his friends were wounded.

Civil rights activist Al Sharpton sat next to the fiance, Nicole Paultre, in a gallery packed with Bell's friends and relatives and police sympathetic to the defendants. Protesters outside, many of whom wanted the officers to face murder charges, held up signs numbered 1 to 50, chanting each number.

Demonstrators have called the case an example of police brutality toward blacks. One of the defendants is a black, one is black Hispanic and the third is white.

The case will be decided by a State Supreme Court judge because the officers waived their right to a jury trial, saying any jury in the borough of Queens would be biased against police due to intense media coverage.

Prosecutor Charles Testagrossa told the judge in opening arguments that once the evidence is heard, "It will be clear that what happened cannot be explained away as a mere accident or mistake. It can only be characterized as criminal."

But lawyers for the detectives argued that the shooting was justified because their clients had reason to believe Bell and his friends were armed and dangerous.

There was evidence Bell was drunk and "out of control" when he left the club, and witnesses overheard him exchange curses with another patron and heard Bell's friend Joseph Guzman tell someone to "Go get my gat," slang for gun, said Anthony Ricco, an attorney for Detective Gescard Isnora.

He argued that Bell, at Guzman's urging, tried to run over Isnora with his car after the officers confronted Bell's party and identified themselves as police. Ricco described the car as a "deadly weapon" and "human battering ram."

"When there is a confluence of alcohol and ignorance, there's always a tragedy," Ricco said.

Isnora and Detective Michael Oliver have pleaded not guilty to manslaughter; Detective Marc Cooper has pleaded not guilty to reckless endangerment. Oliver fired 31 shots — including the one that killed Bell — Isnora fired 11 shots and Cooper fired four times. Two other officers also fired shots, but have not been charged.

The woman Bell was to marry, Nicole Paultre-Bell, wept as she testified about being summoned to a hospital and learning Bell was dead.

 Paultre-Bell, who has two young daughters from Bell and legally took her fiance's name after his death, recounted in a soft voice how she met him in high school and how he had a tattoo on his chest bearing her nickname, "Coli."

She was not cross-examined.

Paultre said that she and Bell, the father of her two young daughters, had been high school sweethearts.

She said that she had attended a bridal shower at her mother's home on the night of Bell's death, and that he and six friends had planned his bachelor party at the last minute.

On what was to be their wedding day, Paultre said she went to the hospital with her mother and older sister to see Bell. When asked what condition he was in, Paultre broke down in tears. "He was in the morgue," she said.

While comparisons to other police-involved shootings are inevitable, this trial wasn't expected to arouse the kind of outrage that occurred after the 1999 killing of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed African immigrant hit by 19 of the 41 shots fired by police in the Bronx. The officers were acquitted of criminal charges in a 2000 trial.

In the current case, the officers involved are Hispanic, black and white. Bell was black, as are the other victims.

Oliver and Isnora face up to 25 years in prison if convicted; Cooper faces up to one year on the lesser endangerment count. [MORE] and [MORE]