[Ppnews] Whitewash of Sean Bell's Murder by Police Continues in Court

[Political Prisoner News]

Revolution #124, March 23,2008
*Whitewash of Sean Bell's Murder by Police Continues in Court*

 From a correspondent

"This whole thing is so twisted. You've got the victims—Sean and the other
two with him that night—being attacked like they're the criminals, and the
criminals—the cops who killed Sean—being treated like they're the victims.
But you know, I've been at other trials of police who've murdered Black
people and here's the thing. It plays out pretty much the same way every
time."

This comment, made to me by a Black woman as she and I waited for a
15-minute recess at the Sean Bell trial to end, reflected the feelings of
others who have come to the Queens, N.Y., courthouse almost every day since
the trial began on Febrary 25, to hear testimony in the case of the three
NYPD detectives indicted in the killing on November 25, 2006, of 23-year-old
Sean Bell and serious wounding of two of his friends, Joseph Guzman and
Trent Benefield, in a lethal rain of 50 bullets, hours before Sean was to be
married.

The courtroom, presided over by Judge Arthur Cooperman—who will decide the
outcome of this case since the cops opted to have a bench trial rather than
a trial by jury—is physically divided down the middle as if by a large wall,
although there is no wall there. On one side sit the three cop defendants
and their attorneys, and behind them, on the half dozen or so rows of wooden
benches, sit members of the NYPD, decked out in their best suits and with
U.S. flag and Police Benevolent Association pins neatly placed in their
lapels.

On the other side sit the prosecutors, members of the Queens D.A.'s office,
who act quite uncomfortable and unhappy about having to try police officers.
After all, they are much more accustomed to prosecuting Black youth. And
behind the prosecutors sit members and supporters of the Sean Bell family,
including his still-mourning mother and father, Valerie and William, who
sometimes have fled the courtroom when testimony or photos depicting the
death scene have become all too stark and horrific. Also there every day is
Sean's fiancée, Nicole Paultre Bell, who was the first person to testify and
who broke down on the stand when she had to describe seeing Sean at the
hospital morgue shortly after he was murdered.

Testimony by witnesses and video footage has painted a picture of a wild
terror, as police blasted away with 50 shots at Sean Bell and his friends.
Security video from a nearby AirTrain station showed transit police
scrambling for cover and shouting at passengers to duck, as one of the
police bullets shattered a window.

A woman who lives in the vicinity of the club where Sean Bell was murdered
testified that she hollered to her kids, "Don't come out of your room!" The
woman, Maria Rodrigues, testified that as she and her children hid in their
beds, a bullet from the police barrage came through a window in her home and
lodged a lampshade in her house. Another neighbor, Bernardino Dossantos,
went to see what happened. He described how the police treated the victims
of the shooting: "I see a man. He got the belly down to the concrete. He got
the handcuffs down to the back. He got blood to the head." Dossantos' SUV
was also hit by police bullets.

But it is Sean Bell and his two friends, Joseph Guzman and Trent Benefield—
both of them seriously wounded—who are being treated as the *criminals *in
this trial. Just two days after the 50-bullet barrage, the authorities, and
the ever-compliant mass media, began to paint a picture of Sean, Joseph, and
Trent as criminals involved with drugs. They concocted a tale, which they
soon dropped but not before the mass media had played it to the max, that
there might have been a "fourth man" on the scene that night standing close
to Sean's car with a gun in his hand.

In the last week or so of the trial, the three cops' lawyers have opened up
a new line of attack on Sean, Joseph, and Trent. They say that a small
amount of marijuana, less than an eighth of an ounce, was found in a plastic
bag on Liverpool Street, not far from where Sean, Joseph, and Trent were
fired upon. As if, if this were the case, it justified *killing *Sean Bell.

The defense attorneys are also arguing that the collection of ballistic and
other evidence that night by the NYPD crime scene unit was tainted, and that
evidence was tampered with or removed by police investigators. That the
forensic examination of Bell's car didn't happen until 24 hours after the
shooting, and that all kinds of people had access to the vehicle before it
was officially examined by a police investigator. And that during the
initial "investigation" of the vehicle by other police, investigators didn't
note bullets that were lying in the car in plain sight. And defense lawyers
got a police investigator to testify—in cross-examination—that he had
changed a statement made by one of the police who did the shooting.

If in fact there were these kinds of instances of corrupted and "missed"
evidence, the most charitable explanation is callous carelessness by the
authorities over the death of a Black man at the hands of the police. Much
more likely is that all this contamination of the investigation and the
crime scene was a conscious and systematic cover-up, as the system scrambled
to deal with public outrage over the murder of Sean Bell. But whatever
combination of callous carelessness and/or conscious cover-up was in effect,
the"investigation" in the aftermath of the shooting worked to ensure that if
the murdering police went to trial, the evidence would be covered up or
compromised. And nothing in this trial is getting to the bottom of *that.*

The cops' lawyers opened the trial by referring to Sean and his two friends
as part of the "negative element." This "negative element" is code for Black
people and other people of color, especially the youth. It's code for the
people who this system has no jobs for, no decent education, no decent
health care or housing, no decent future, no hope. Code that stands for
"license to kill," for the armed enforcers of this system to murder at will
Black and other youth—who are considered to be "dangerous surplus
population" by the system. And to do this without being punished, since it
is what they are supposed to do and are trained to do.

-- Steve Yip P.O. Box 941, Knickerbocker Station 
New York, New York 10002-0900 866-841-9139 x2670, 
yipzzz at gmail.com It's time to throw off the 
chains of oppression, and get with the emancipators of humanity!



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