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Yesterday the lawyers of three detectives who are charged of
killing an unarmed man in Queens in 2006 asked for the trial to be moved from New York City saying that
most of the potential jurors find the detectives guilty thus not having a
chance to a fair trial.
The three detectives, Michael Oliver, Gescard F. Isnora and
Marc Cooper are charged for shooting and killing a man, Sean Bell, when the
victim exited a Jamaica
strip club just on the day he was to be married.
According to the New York Times, the lawyers said in the
motion they’ve filled Monday, that they’ve conducted a poll interviewing 600 Queen
residents. It turned out that 60.5 percent of those questioned believed the
detectives’ shootings were unjustified. Also almost 47 percent believe that the
detectives made a mistake.
The motion said: “From the very outset of this case, which
has become known as ‘the Sean Bell Case,’ or ‘the 50-Shot Case,’ there has been
an enormous amount of highly prejudicial local media publicity coming from both
the print and broadcast media.”
The motion doesn’t say where the case should be moved, but
to be in “another urban county.”
Sean Bell, along with two friends, Joseph Guzman and Trent
Benefield, was leaving Club Kalua on the morning of November 25, 2006 just when
the police was conducting an undercover investigation in the club. Officers
shot 50 bullets at Bell
believing that he was armed, and killed him. His two friends were injured.
Police said that Bell
wanted to hit the detectives with the car.
Queens District Attorney Richard Brown believes that there
is possible to find an impartial jury so he declared that he will fight to keep
the trial in Queens, the New York Daily News informs.
Detectives Endowment Association President Michael Palladino
says otherwise: “I think it's pretty well-established that there's been
irreparable harm done to the jury pool.”
Another similar case occurred in 1999 when Amadou Diallo, an
immigrant, was killed by four officers in his apartment in Bronx.
After the trial was moved to Albany,
the officers were acquitted.
Oliver and Isnora can be charged for first- and
second-degree manslaughter resulting in a sentence of 25 years, and Cooper is
facing two charges of reckless endangerment and may receive a year in jail.
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