NEW YORK (Reuters) - Three New York City detectives due to be tried over the shooting death of an unarmed black man hours before his wedding plan to ask for the trial to be moved because they say an unbiased jury cannot be found locally.
By Edith Honan
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Three New York City detectives due to be tried over the shooting death of an unarmed black man hours before his wedding plan to ask for the trial to be moved because they say an unbiased jury cannot be found locally.
Lawyers for the white, Hispanic and black detectives met with Judge Arthur Cooperman and prosecutors to warn them that they planned to ask an appeals court to change the venue of the high-profile trial, a law enforcement source said on Friday.
Two of the men were charged with criminal manslaughter and the third with reckless endangerment after Sean Bell, 23, died in a 50-shot barrage as he and two friends left a strip club where they were holding a bachelor party. Another two officers involved in the shooting were not charged.
!ADVERTISEMENT!Civil rights activist Al Sharpton and the Bell family said on Friday they would not cooperate in the trial, due to start on February 4, if it was held outside Queens, the New York City borough where the shooting took place.
"This is insulting," Sharpton said. "You can shoot in Queens, you can police in Queens, but you cannot be judged by the people of Queens," he told Reuters.
He said that Joseph Guzman and Trent Benefield, Bell's friends who were also wounded in the shooting, would likely refuse to testify if the trial was moved elsewhere.
The five officers shot at Bell's car around 4 a.m. on November 25 last year in the mistaken belief someone had gone to fetch a gun to settle a dispute inside the club, police said.
"There is no reason to believe that a fair and impartial jury cannot be found among the 2.3 million residents of this county," Queens District Attorney Richard Brown said in a statement.
The venue dispute mirrors a similar case nearly a decade ago, when four police officers charged in the shooting death of an unarmed West African man, Amadou Diallo, were tried in Albany, the mostly white state capital. The shooting actually took place in the Bronx, which is heavily populated by minority groups.
The court found that intense media coverage had made it impossible to find an unbiased jury. The officers were later acquitted of murder. In 2004, Diallo's family accepted a $3 million settlement of a civil lawsuit against New York City.
(Editing by Eric Walsh)
