By RICHARD STEIER
The wait for a verdict in most trials contains two elements of uncertainty: what and when. For the three Detectives charged in the fatal shooting of Sean Bell, "when" was taken out of the equation when Queens Supreme Court Justice Arthur J. Cooperman, who is deciding the case without a jury, announced even before final summations April 14 that he would issue a ruling on April 25.
That doesn't necessarily make the wait easier to endure, Detectives Endowment Association President Mike Palladino said April 16. "The last thing I really needed was a two-week layoff, but I understand it," he said, back to his routine in his lower Manhattan office after seven weeks when most of his workday was spent in Justice Cooperman's courtroom in Kew Gardens.
"It's difficult on them as well," he said, referring to Dets. Gescard Isnora, Michael Oliver and Marc Cooper, who among them fired 46 of the 50 shots at Mr. Bell and his two companions, Trent Benefield and Joseph Guzman, as the climax of events set in motion by a quarrel pitting Mr. Bell and his friends against a stranger named Fabian Coicou early on the morning of Nov. 25, 2006.
A Humbling Transformation
"It's humbling to go from enforcing the law to having the law enforced on you," said Detective Palladino, whose own career included two shootouts 26 years ago, neither of them leading to criminal charges.
The Detectives and their lawyers had sought a change of venue, contending that negative pre-trial publicity including remarks by Mayor Bloomberg shortly after the shooting would make it impossible to pick a Queens jury that could be fair. After an Appellate Division panel denied that motion, they opted to waive a jury trial and leave their fate in Justice Cooperman's hands.
"That's why Sharpton didn't show up - because there was no jury to play to," Mr. Palladino asserted, referring to the fact that the Rev. Al Sharpton was rarely in court, instead leaving it to two lawyers representing the Bell family, Mr. Guzman and Mr. Benefield in their civil suit against the city to serve as spokesmen outside the building each day.
"I think the trial was done fairly," he said. "It was a level playing field. But I don't think we could have gotten a level field [in Queens] with a jury."
One factor in the time between closing arguments and the rendering of a decision is believed to be concerns about possible civil unrest if Justice Cooperman rules in the Detectives' favor, leaving the city reluctant to have a verdict handed down while Pope Benedict was in town.
If all three cops are acquitted, Mr. Palladino said, "I expect some type of fallout, only because I've seen some of the literature that's been distributed already. The rushing to judgment winds up creating a certain atmosphere." As to whether protests would go beyond street rallies, he said, "I certainly hope not."
He said Detectives Isnora, Oliver and Cooper were "cautiously optimistic." At the same time, "All three of them wish the incident never occurred. They all wish Sean Bell would've just pulled the car over or stopped. Everyone involved, their lives have been changed forever - that's Nicole [Paultre-Bell] and the children, and the three Detectives."
'Guilty Will Change Law-Enforcement'
On the other hand, he continued, "A verdict of guilty I think will change law-enforcement, because law-enforcement would have to re-evaluate what it does. They were acting in good faith, and a sequence of events takes place that leads them to believe that they had to take action to protect themselves, to protect the public."
To prove that Detectives Isnora and Oliver were guilty of manslaughter and Detective Cooper of reckless endangerment, Detective Palladino said, "You need credible witnesses and I believe you need evidence that supports their accounts. I don't believe the District Attorney has either. The evidence supports the account of the police more than the account of the prosecution."
Assistant District Attorney Charles Testagrossa's closing summation seemed to have two crucial flaws. One was that it insisted that cops had concocted details of the confrontation between Mr. Coicou and Mr. Bell and his friends in order to justify Detective Isnora's decision to follow Mr. Bell to his car. But he never explained why, if the Detective did not have reason to believe - correctly or not - that there was the possibility of violence because of the harsh words that had been exchanged, Mr. Isnora sought to confront Mr. Bell.
In discussing Mr. Bell's decision to drive his car into the Detective, then, after colliding with a minivan carrying backup officers including Detective Oliver, to drive straight at Mr. Isnora again, Assistant DA Testagrossa asserted that because no one at the scene identified themselves as cops, Mr. Bell had every right to believe he was about to become the victim of a crime and take action - including using his car as a weapon - to get away.
But if that were true - and that would rest on disbelieving the claim by Mr. Isnora, which was supported by Police Officer Michael Carey, that he had identified himself as a cop - the logical extension of that argument would be that if the Detective believed that Mr. Bell was trying to do him serious bodily harm, that would justify his firing his gun in response.
'Inconsistent As Witnesses'
"Testagrossa's summation, in my opinion," Mr. Palladino said, "paralleled his presentation of the case for seven weeks: it was as inconsistent as his witnesses. They made a lot of accusations but didn't back them up."
In contrast, he said, "The police account has been the same from the minute the shooting took place."
Those inconsistencies, both among the witnesses and, in the cases of Mr. Benefield, Mr. Guzman and Mr. Coicou, between the accounts that they initially gave to the Queens DA's Office and what they later said on the witness stand, figured heavily into the decision by defense lawyers not to have the Detectives testify in their own behalf. They believed they had done more than enough to raise doubts about the credibility and truthfulness of those three men to gain acquittals without having to risk the Detectives being tripped up under cross-examination.
"These witnesses," Mr. Palladino said, "Testagrossa knew there were discrepancies and inconsistencies and different versions."
'Impeached Own Witness'
Noting that Mr. Testagrossa called one of the undercover Detectives who had been at Kalua that night, Hispolito Sanchez, as a prosecution witness but then dismissed his testimony that he heard Mr. Guzman, during the argument with Mr. Coicou, twice say, "Yo, go get my gun," Mr. Palladino said, "He sounded like a desperate man when he impeached his own witness. And he basically called Benefield a moron."
Becoming more intense, he continued, "In his tirade, he called the Detectives murderers. Well, they're not charged with murder."
He said he believed two matters complicated the prosecution's task. The most important, Mr. Palladino indicated, was that at the time the Queens DA's Office won indictments against the three cops, not all the physical evidence was in "and they locked themselves into a theory." While Mr. Testagrossa described the injuries suffered by Detective Isnora when he was struck by Mr. Bell's car as minor, an imprint of the Detective's jeans on the car's front bumper suggested there was considerable force in the contact.
A spokesman for the Queens DA's Office, Kevin Ryan, said he could not comment on any of the grand jury proceedings, adding, "The District Attorney is not commenting on anything about this case other than what occurs in court."
The problems with the DA's case were compounded, the DEA leader said, by changes in the stories told by Mr. Benefield and Mr. Guzman that defense lawyers argued were designed to improve their chances of winning a $50-million civil suit they filed along with Mr. Bell's family. Defense lawyers raised significant questions about their credibility by pointing out during cross-examination how the shifts in their accounts seemed tailored to the civil suit by suggesting that Mr. Isnora had no reason to believe violence was imminent if he didn't intervene before they caught up with Mr. Coicou.
'Trying Two Cases'
Claiming that one of the lawyers representing the plaintiffs in that suit, Sanford Rubinstein, repeatedly passed notes to Mr. Testagrossa in court, Mr. Palladino said, "These guys were trying to get the right questions out for the civil suit. But you can't have it two ways. You can't have a criminal case and try to play out the civil case inside it." He said Mr. Benefield, who was a particularly muddled witness, told a story that sought to transform him "from victim into businessman."
Mr. Guzman was a much more self-assured witness, but he was baited by the defense lawyers into displaying the more-abrasive side of his personality that reminded the courtroom of his two felony convictions, each of which resulted in prison time. In the midst of one riveting exchange, Mr. Guzman attempted to go toe to toe verbally with Mr. Isnora's lawyer, Anthony Ricco, and in the process undercut his claim that he had tried to defuse tensions with Mr. Coicou. Mr. Ricco stated that his demeanor on the witness stand was that of somebody unwilling to let a challenge go; rather than deny this, moments later Mr. Guzman twice angrily demanded, "Where you from?" when the attorney asked whether it wasn't true that he had threatened to get a gun to deal with Mr. Coicou.
"In his closing statement, Testagrossa said Guzman was entitled to act that way," Mr. Palladino said, referring to the prosecutor's assertion that defense lawyers looked to provoke and embarrass Mr. Guzman and Mr. Benefield. But the whole point of the manner in which Mr. Ricco and James Culleton - Mr. Oliver's attorney - went after Mr. Guzman was to divert him from the coaching he had received from prosecutors about how to make a good impression on the witness stand. His willingness to dance with them helped make their case.
'He Allowed Perjury'
Mr. Palladino remarked, "I still feel the purpose of the District Attorney's Office is to get to the truth, and not mislead the public. But with Coicou, Benefield and Guzman, he allowed them to get on the stand and perjure themselves.
It's hard to imagine that the Queens DA's Office had any choice but to bring this case to trial, given that 50 shots were fired by the cops at three men who turned out to be unarmed. It sometimes seemed that by calling witnesses whose testimony was more helpful to the defense than to the prosecution, Mr. Testagrossa was offering the public a look at the full complexity of the case so that it would understand if no convictions were produced.
Mr. Palladino wondered, though, whether the political sensitivity of what happened didn't influence how the DA presented the case to the grand jury to ensure that it handed up indictments against some of the cops involved. Acknowledging he hadn't had access to all the notes from the grand jury proceeding, he said he nonetheless believed that if the grand jurors had known that Mr. Coicou had told prosecutors he heard Mr. Guzman say, "Let me go get my gat," they would have been less likely to indict the three cops.
"I also don't think the grand jury knew that Isnora had been run over," Mr. Palladino said. "I think he exercised a phenomenal amount of restraint not firing after he was hit or the car struck the minivan."
Detective Oliver had taken the most heat in media coverage because he fired 31 shots at the car, and at one point paused to reload his gun. But Mr. Palladino noted that after the shooting the Detective had "the presence of mind to run back to the car and call for help, call for an ambulance. I don't think those are the acts of an executioner."
A High-Profile Role
Prior to the case, Mr. Palladino was not particularly well-known outside union circles, despite the fact that he heads what he called "the second-largest police union in the state." His aggressive advocacy on behalf of his three members has drawn fierce criticism from Mr. Bell's supporters, but also a grudging tribute from one family advocate who told a Village Voice reporter that he believed Mr. Palladino had more fire than the civil lawyers for the Bell family.
"Whatever I was doing was simply in a supportive role for the Detectives," Mr. Palladino said. "I don't think it had any impact within the four walls of Judge Cooperman's courtroom; all it did was balance" what the lawyers bringing the civil suit were telling the media. "As a labor leader, I'm not going to stand by and watch these opportunists try to railroad my three Detectives."
It might not be a coincidence that when the union's nominating process closed last week, Mr. Palladino found himself unopposed for a second four-year term as DEA president.
Change in Attitude
While far more is at stake for his three members - whose freedom and future careers will be decided sometime on Friday - Mr. Palladino said that the case has changed him as well, notwithstanding the numerous previous shooting incidents in which he represented DEA members over the years.
"I think it's the magnitude of this particular case," he said. "I will never approach a shooting as routine again."
The wait for a verdict in most trials contains two elements of uncertainty: what and when. For the three Detectives charged in the fatal shooting of Sean Bell, "when" was taken out of the equation when Queens Supreme Court Justice Arthur J. Cooperman, who is deciding the case without a jury, announced even before final summations April 14 that he would issue a ruling on April 25.
That doesn't necessarily make the wait easier to endure, Detectives Endowment Association President Mike Palladino said April 16. "The last thing I really needed was a two-week layoff, but I understand it," he said, back to his routine in his lower Manhattan office after seven weeks when most of his workday was spent in Justice Cooperman's courtroom in Kew Gardens.
"It's difficult on them as well," he said, referring to Dets. Gescard Isnora, Michael Oliver and Marc Cooper, who among them fired 46 of the 50 shots at Mr. Bell and his two companions, Trent Benefield and Joseph Guzman, as the climax of events set in motion by a quarrel pitting Mr. Bell and his friends against a stranger named Fabian Coicou early on the morning of Nov. 25, 2006.
A Humbling Transformation
"It's humbling to go from enforcing the law to having the law enforced on you," said Detective Palladino, whose own career included two shootouts 26 years ago, neither of them leading to criminal charges.
The Detectives and their lawyers had sought a change of venue, contending that negative pre-trial publicity including remarks by Mayor Bloomberg shortly after the shooting would make it impossible to pick a Queens jury that could be fair. After an Appellate Division panel denied that motion, they opted to waive a jury trial and leave their fate in Justice Cooperman's hands.
"That's why Sharpton didn't show up - because there was no jury to play to," Mr. Palladino asserted, referring to the fact that the Rev. Al Sharpton was rarely in court, instead leaving it to two lawyers representing the Bell family, Mr. Guzman and Mr. Benefield in their civil suit against the city to serve as spokesmen outside the building each day.
"I think the trial was done fairly," he said. "It was a level playing field. But I don't think we could have gotten a level field [in Queens] with a jury."
One factor in the time between closing arguments and the rendering of a decision is believed to be concerns about possible civil unrest if Justice Cooperman rules in the Detectives' favor, leaving the city reluctant to have a verdict handed down while Pope Benedict was in town.
If all three cops are acquitted, Mr. Palladino said, "I expect some type of fallout, only because I've seen some of the literature that's been distributed already. The rushing to judgment winds up creating a certain atmosphere." As to whether protests would go beyond street rallies, he said, "I certainly hope not."
He said Detectives Isnora, Oliver and Cooper were "cautiously optimistic." At the same time, "All three of them wish the incident never occurred. They all wish Sean Bell would've just pulled the car over or stopped. Everyone involved, their lives have been changed forever - that's Nicole [Paultre-Bell] and the children, and the three Detectives."
'Guilty Will Change Law-Enforcement'
On the other hand, he continued, "A verdict of guilty I think will change law-enforcement, because law-enforcement would have to re-evaluate what it does. They were acting in good faith, and a sequence of events takes place that leads them to believe that they had to take action to protect themselves, to protect the public."
To prove that Detectives Isnora and Oliver were guilty of manslaughter and Detective Cooper of reckless endangerment, Detective Palladino said, "You need credible witnesses and I believe you need evidence that supports their accounts. I don't believe the District Attorney has either. The evidence supports the account of the police more than the account of the prosecution."
Assistant District Attorney Charles Testagrossa's closing summation seemed to have two crucial flaws. One was that it insisted that cops had concocted details of the confrontation between Mr. Coicou and Mr. Bell and his friends in order to justify Detective Isnora's decision to follow Mr. Bell to his car. But he never explained why, if the Detective did not have reason to believe - correctly or not - that there was the possibility of violence because of the harsh words that had been exchanged, Mr. Isnora sought to confront Mr. Bell.
In discussing Mr. Bell's decision to drive his car into the Detective, then, after colliding with a minivan carrying backup officers including Detective Oliver, to drive straight at Mr. Isnora again, Assistant DA Testagrossa asserted that because no one at the scene identified themselves as cops, Mr. Bell had every right to believe he was about to become the victim of a crime and take action - including using his car as a weapon - to get away.
But if that were true - and that would rest on disbelieving the claim by Mr. Isnora, which was supported by Police Officer Michael Carey, that he had identified himself as a cop - the logical extension of that argument would be that if the Detective believed that Mr. Bell was trying to do him serious bodily harm, that would justify his firing his gun in response.
'Inconsistent As Witnesses'
"Testagrossa's summation, in my opinion," Mr. Palladino said, "paralleled his presentation of the case for seven weeks: it was as inconsistent as his witnesses. They made a lot of accusations but didn't back them up."
In contrast, he said, "The police account has been the same from the minute the shooting took place."
Those inconsistencies, both among the witnesses and, in the cases of Mr. Benefield, Mr. Guzman and Mr. Coicou, between the accounts that they initially gave to the Queens DA's Office and what they later said on the witness stand, figured heavily into the decision by defense lawyers not to have the Detectives testify in their own behalf. They believed they had done more than enough to raise doubts about the credibility and truthfulness of those three men to gain acquittals without having to risk the Detectives being tripped up under cross-examination.
"These witnesses," Mr. Palladino said, "Testagrossa knew there were discrepancies and inconsistencies and different versions."
'Impeached Own Witness'
Noting that Mr. Testagrossa called one of the undercover Detectives who had been at Kalua that night, Hispolito Sanchez, as a prosecution witness but then dismissed his testimony that he heard Mr. Guzman, during the argument with Mr. Coicou, twice say, "Yo, go get my gun," Mr. Palladino said, "He sounded like a desperate man when he impeached his own witness. And he basically called Benefield a moron."
Becoming more intense, he continued, "In his tirade, he called the Detectives murderers. Well, they're not charged with murder."
He said he believed two matters complicated the prosecution's task. The most important, Mr. Palladino indicated, was that at the time the Queens DA's Office won indictments against the three cops, not all the physical evidence was in "and they locked themselves into a theory." While Mr. Testagrossa described the injuries suffered by Detective Isnora when he was struck by Mr. Bell's car as minor, an imprint of the Detective's jeans on the car's front bumper suggested there was considerable force in the contact.
A spokesman for the Queens DA's Office, Kevin Ryan, said he could not comment on any of the grand jury proceedings, adding, "The District Attorney is not commenting on anything about this case other than what occurs in court."
The problems with the DA's case were compounded, the DEA leader said, by changes in the stories told by Mr. Benefield and Mr. Guzman that defense lawyers argued were designed to improve their chances of winning a $50-million civil suit they filed along with Mr. Bell's family. Defense lawyers raised significant questions about their credibility by pointing out during cross-examination how the shifts in their accounts seemed tailored to the civil suit by suggesting that Mr. Isnora had no reason to believe violence was imminent if he didn't intervene before they caught up with Mr. Coicou.
'Trying Two Cases'
Claiming that one of the lawyers representing the plaintiffs in that suit, Sanford Rubinstein, repeatedly passed notes to Mr. Testagrossa in court, Mr. Palladino said, "These guys were trying to get the right questions out for the civil suit. But you can't have it two ways. You can't have a criminal case and try to play out the civil case inside it." He said Mr. Benefield, who was a particularly muddled witness, told a story that sought to transform him "from victim into businessman."
Mr. Guzman was a much more self-assured witness, but he was baited by the defense lawyers into displaying the more-abrasive side of his personality that reminded the courtroom of his two felony convictions, each of which resulted in prison time. In the midst of one riveting exchange, Mr. Guzman attempted to go toe to toe verbally with Mr. Isnora's lawyer, Anthony Ricco, and in the process undercut his claim that he had tried to defuse tensions with Mr. Coicou. Mr. Ricco stated that his demeanor on the witness stand was that of somebody unwilling to let a challenge go; rather than deny this, moments later Mr. Guzman twice angrily demanded, "Where you from?" when the attorney asked whether it wasn't true that he had threatened to get a gun to deal with Mr. Coicou.
"In his closing statement, Testagrossa said Guzman was entitled to act that way," Mr. Palladino said, referring to the prosecutor's assertion that defense lawyers looked to provoke and embarrass Mr. Guzman and Mr. Benefield. But the whole point of the manner in which Mr. Ricco and James Culleton - Mr. Oliver's attorney - went after Mr. Guzman was to divert him from the coaching he had received from prosecutors about how to make a good impression on the witness stand. His willingness to dance with them helped make their case.
'He Allowed Perjury'
Mr. Palladino remarked, "I still feel the purpose of the District Attorney's Office is to get to the truth, and not mislead the public. But with Coicou, Benefield and Guzman, he allowed them to get on the stand and perjure themselves.
It's hard to imagine that the Queens DA's Office had any choice but to bring this case to trial, given that 50 shots were fired by the cops at three men who turned out to be unarmed. It sometimes seemed that by calling witnesses whose testimony was more helpful to the defense than to the prosecution, Mr. Testagrossa was offering the public a look at the full complexity of the case so that it would understand if no convictions were produced.
Mr. Palladino wondered, though, whether the political sensitivity of what happened didn't influence how the DA presented the case to the grand jury to ensure that it handed up indictments against some of the cops involved. Acknowledging he hadn't had access to all the notes from the grand jury proceeding, he said he nonetheless believed that if the grand jurors had known that Mr. Coicou had told prosecutors he heard Mr. Guzman say, "Let me go get my gat," they would have been less likely to indict the three cops.
"I also don't think the grand jury knew that Isnora had been run over," Mr. Palladino said. "I think he exercised a phenomenal amount of restraint not firing after he was hit or the car struck the minivan."
Detective Oliver had taken the most heat in media coverage because he fired 31 shots at the car, and at one point paused to reload his gun. But Mr. Palladino noted that after the shooting the Detective had "the presence of mind to run back to the car and call for help, call for an ambulance. I don't think those are the acts of an executioner."
A High-Profile Role
Prior to the case, Mr. Palladino was not particularly well-known outside union circles, despite the fact that he heads what he called "the second-largest police union in the state." His aggressive advocacy on behalf of his three members has drawn fierce criticism from Mr. Bell's supporters, but also a grudging tribute from one family advocate who told a Village Voice reporter that he believed Mr. Palladino had more fire than the civil lawyers for the Bell family.
"Whatever I was doing was simply in a supportive role for the Detectives," Mr. Palladino said. "I don't think it had any impact within the four walls of Judge Cooperman's courtroom; all it did was balance" what the lawyers bringing the civil suit were telling the media. "As a labor leader, I'm not going to stand by and watch these opportunists try to railroad my three Detectives."
It might not be a coincidence that when the union's nominating process closed last week, Mr. Palladino found himself unopposed for a second four-year term as DEA president.
Change in Attitude
While far more is at stake for his three members - whose freedom and future careers will be decided sometime on Friday - Mr. Palladino said that the case has changed him as well, notwithstanding the numerous previous shooting incidents in which he represented DEA members over the years.
"I think it's the magnitude of this particular case," he said. "I will never approach a shooting as routine again."
