Final Defense Witnesses Testify in Sean Bell Case

From the New York Times  By MICHAEL WILSON

Testimony concluded in the Sean Bell case with the last of the six defense witnesses taking the stand on Tuesday, the 26th day of the trial, and both sides preparing to deliver closing arguments next week, lawyers said.

The defense did not formally rest its case. But it is expected to so on Thursday after making various motions before Justice Arthur J. Cooperman, who is hearing the case without a jury. After closing arguments, the judge will consider verdicts in the charges against the three defendants, Detectives Gescard F. Isnora, Michael Oliver and Marc Cooper. Detectives Isnora and Oliver face charges of first- and second-degree manslaughter, assault and misdemeanor counts of reckless endangerment. Detective Cooper, whose shots hit no one, faces just the charges of reckless endangerment.

The detectives did not testify, indicating that their lawyers were satisfied with the versions of the shooting that the men gave under oath in grand jury testimony last year, accounts that were read aloud by prosecutors during the trial. By putting the detectives on the witness stand, the defense would have given prosecutors the chance to trip them up on cross-examination, an opportunity that prosecutors did not have in reading back the old testimony.

The defense case lasted three days. Its star witness was its first, Officer Michael Carey, who fired 3 of 50 shots in the shooting on Nov. 25, 2006, outside the Club Kalua in Jamaica, Queens, that killed Mr. Bell and wounded two of his friends, Trent Benefield and Joseph Guzman. Officer Carey testified that Mr. Bell ignored clear police commands to show his hands, and instead drove his Nissan Altima into Detective Isnora and a police van. Other defense witnesses included two friends of Detective Isnora’s and a man who lived nearby and said he had heard the shooting.

The defense on Tuesday also introduced into evidence an audiotape of an interview that Mr. Benefield gave to the police a few hours after the shooting, in which he gave an account that he contradicted on the witness stand last week. On the tape, he said he felt multiple collisions inside the Altima, saying of Mr. Bell, “He kept hitting cars, and he ain’t going nowhere.” During the trial, he said he felt just one collision and that he had made up the version of events that he first presented to the police.

In a way, the defense case started even as the prosecution was presenting its witnesses. The Queens district attorney’s office questioned 50 witnesses and introduced reams of documents and reports. There were myriad contradictions among the witnesses, some of whom gave accounts that matched the detectives’ versions of events and probably shortened the defense witness list.

The defense leaned heavily on the examination of the extensive ballistics evidence in the case, with two experts spending the better part of two days on the stand. Prosecutors have said that the detectives were shooting wildly and also shot at Mr. Benefield as he fled down Liverpool Street. The defense said that no officers shot at Mr. Benefield as he ran. Several bullets were recovered along Liverpool Street, and one of the experts, a retired member of the New York Police Department who worked on the firing range, James Gannalo, examined them.

Mr. Gannalo, the final defense witness, said the bullets appeared to have ricocheted off a surface or object “harder than the bullet,” causing them to pancake, or expand.

An assistant district attorney, Peter T. Reese, spent several minutes during the questioning of another ballistics expert, Alexander Jason, on Mr. Jason’s computer re-creation of the interior of Mr. Bell’s vehicle, with a green figure in the back seat representing Mr. Benefield.

As on Monday, the discussion over where officers were aiming centered on a lampshade in a Liverpool Street living room that appeared to have stopped a bullet. The defense has said that the bullet had ricocheted and was traveling slowly enough to lodge in the lampshade.

On Monday, Mr. Jason described his elaborate re-enactment of the lampshade shooting, in which he bought an identical lamp in a suburb of San Francisco, where he lives. He set up the lamp on a small table in front of a stand-alone window outdoors and fired six shots from 60 feet away. All of the bullets broke through the window and passed through the lampshade.

Prosecutors have said that the bullet did not ricochet, but was a direct shot at Mr. Benefield that missed. That left Mr. Reese, during his cross-examination, in the unenviable position on Tuesday of attempting to show that the lampshade, made of paper, with a cellophane cover, could stop a bullet traveling about 800 miles an hour.

Regarding the re-enactment, Mr. Reese asked if Mr. Jason, besides using a window, had also used a window screen similar to the one on the Liverpool window. Mr. Jason said he did not because it would have had no impact on slowing the bullet.

“How do you know it’s the exact same lamp?” Mr. Reese asked.

Mr. Jason said “a professional shopper” had bought it, and he added: “The professional shopper was my wife. She found the same lamp, to my amazement and delight.”

“You have no idea, the type of material that lampshade is made out of, do you?” Mr. Reese asked. “Was it fiberglass?”

“I believe it was paper,” Mr. Jason replied.

Mr. Reese enlarged a picture of Mr. Jason’s lamp that showed it was taped to the top of the table in the re-enactment. “You didn’t want to break your wife’s lamp?” he asked. “Do you think that at all affected the validity of your scientific experiment?”

Mr. Jason said he was afraid of bumping into the setup: “I thought, ‘I’m just going to kick the table and knock this thing down and ruin the day.’ ”

Mr. Jason charged the defendants $250 an hour and worked more than 200 hours, he said. Mr. Gannalo said he charged $200 an hour. Michael J. Palladino, president of the Detectives’ Endowment Association, said the union had spent around $700,000 on the defense and expected to spend $1 million before the case was over.

“Worth every penny,” he said .[MORE]