Justice has been served.
The circumstances that claimed 23-year-old Sean Bell’s life on the day of his wedding were as self-prophetic as they were tragic.
That much has been decided by a judge, who weighed the conflicting testimonies of 56 witnesses over an eight-week-long trial and determined that cops fired 50 bullets at members of a bachelor party outside a Queens strip club because the carousers had not behaved like law-abiding citizens out for an evening of fun, but like thugs courting a brawl.
Officers Michael Oliver, 36, Gescard Isnora, 26 and Marc Cooper, 40, were slapped with a litany of charges, from manslaughter to reckless endangerment, for the November 25, 2006 shooting that also injured two of Bell’s friends. Ultimately, Judge Arthur Cooperman demonstrated high regard for the badge and ruled that the law enforcers had acted appropriately when, in the middle of investigating reports of prostitution at the Kalua Cabaret, they collided with the drunken Bell party, whose shenanigans were revealed in court to run the gamut from taunting strangers and making motions as if to reach for a gun, to ramming an unmarked police van with their car and
