Lawyers for three police detectives charged in the fatal shooting of Sean Bell in 2006 filed a motion requesting that the trial, scheduled to begin next month, be moved out of New York City, saying publicity has “incurably poisoned” the pool of prospective jurors. The detectives, Michael Oliver, Gescard F. Isnora and Marc Cooper, are charged in the shooting outside a Jamaica, Queens, strip club at which Mr. Bell, an unarmed man, was shot and killed in the early morning of the day that he was to be married.
As Michael Wilson explains, the arguments echoed those made in 1999, before the murder trial of four officers who killed Amadou Diallo, an unarmed West African immigrant, in a barrage of 41 bullets in the vestibule of his Bronx apartment building. Appellate judges in that case moved the trial to Albany, where the officers were acquitted in 2000. Critics of the verdict have held that the move to Albany, a predominantly white area compared with the Bronx, played a major role in the verdict for the white officers. The Queens district attorney, Richard A. Brown, said that he expected his office to file arguments against the motion in the Bell case next week.
As The Daily News notes, the lawyers said a poll they commissioned shows that 83 percent of black potential jurors thought the shooting was unjustified — although nearly half, in response to another question, said they thought the shooting might have been an honest mistake. [Daily News]
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