About The Bell Indictments

It is not surprising that a Queens grand jury has handed up indictments against three of the five police officers involved in the fatal shooting of Sean Bell last November outside a Jamaica strip club that they were monitoring for illegal activities. The number of bullets fired - 50 - and the fact that 31 of them came from a single Detective, Mike Oliver, who reloaded his weapon during the incident, virtually guaranteed that the case would go to a jury to determine whether police actions rose to the level of criminality.

But the old cliché about an indictment being merely an accusation rather than an indication of guilt is particularly true in this incident. There is no cross-examination of witnesses during grand-jury proceedings, and the legal standard for producing an indictment amounts to jurors' determination as to the likelihood that a crime took place, not whether the accused are guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

That means that the actual trial of the three officers will be conducted under a vastly different set of rules, one in which the cops' previously unblemished backgrounds and the past legal troubles of the two key witnesses against them - the passengers in the car with Sean Bell when he was killed - may weigh heavily when either a judge or jury is assessing the credibility of their accounts.

The cops' cause may have been damaged in that regard this past weekend by Detective Oliver's evening out with a friend and two women, during which they ran up a reported tab of $4,200 fueled by several bottles of expensive wine.

Detectives' Endowment Association President Mike Palladino defended Detective Oliver after the pricey dinner furnished a spicy meal for the tabloids and local TV stations, noting that he was entitled to dine wherever he wanted.

On the one hand, this is true. It's also true that gang members are permitted to wear their colors to trial and organized-crime captains can wear their normal street attire in the courtroom. Most of them choose not to do so because they are aware that appearances count. And even if the case doesn't go to trial for another year, a judge or potential jurors may well remember this bit of living large and will have a certain impression of him that a tasteful suit might not sweep away.

Detective Oliver, because of the number of shots fired, figures to have the most to overcome of the three accused officers, even though he had an exemplary service record prior to this case, making more than 600 arrests without ever firing his gun. To compound his problem with an ostentatious night on the town suggested his judgment was gone with the wine. The price tag on the dinner is what whetted the media's appetite; we doubt it would have even rated a story if the bill had been for a couple of hundred dollars. That said, we still believe the case against the three cops - Dets. Gescard Isnora and Marc Cooper were the other men indicted - will pivot on whether jurors believe their account of how things unfolded four months ago outside the Kalua Cabaret.

According to the NYPD's initial account of the incident, Mr. Isnora, working undercover, had been inside the strip club and wound up outside near Mr. Bell and his party. Angry words were said to have been exchanged with another group of men, and according to the police version of events, Mr. Bell's friend, Joseph Guzman, made a threat to go get his gun.

It was that threat that was said to have prompted Detective Isnora to violate normal protocol governing undercover officers and set out after Mr. Bell, Mr. Guzman and Trent Benefield, rather than handing off that task to his back-ups. When he approached the three men in Mr. Bell's car, according to police, Mr. Bell, rather than obeying his command, drove the car into Detective Isnora. He was said to have contended that he saw Mr. Guzman reach into his waistband, and the two actions led him to believe he was in mortal danger, and he began firing at them. Four other cops joined in shooting; two of them were not indicted.

Trial jurors or a judge are going to have to decide whether in fact Mr. Guzman made a threat to get a gun. If he did, considering the fact that the incident took place at 4 a.m. and that Mr. Bell and his companions had reportedly been drinking heavily as they celebrated his impending marriage later that day, a strong case could be made that Detective Isnora had reason to believe there was an imminent threat of deadly force being used. Once such a conclusion was reached, his actions in approaching their car and then using his own gun when he believed himself to be in danger could well be deemed a justified response. That would be true even though no gun was found in the car: how could the Detective know that Mr. Guzman was making an idle threat?

The circumstances involving an unarmed man being shot to death on his wedding day, combined with the number of bullets fired by police, have made the case a flashpoint in the often-tense relations between cops and young black men.

Even allowing for some of the frustration and anger in the black community, however, Council Member Charles Barron once again sunk to the irresponsible depths in which he seems happiest on Saturday when he told a rally in Union Square, "If the system doesn't protect us, we have to protect ourselves from killer cops by any means necessary." As an elected official, Mr. Barron ought to feel a greater sense of responsibility than to be lobbing verbal Molotov cocktails in advance of a trial. That is particularly so in a case where the killing may have been literally triggered by an angry threat that had no basis in reality.

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