Family of slain man to keep fighting

Legal experts say the family might have to take its lawsuit to civil court.

NEW YORK (AP) — The family of an unarmed man killed in a hail of police gunfire on his wedding day pledged Saturday to continue its fight to have someone held accountable for his death, a day after a judge acquitted three officers in the slaying.

“I’m still praying for justice, because it’s not over. It’s far from over. It’s just starting,” Sean Bell’s fiancee, Nicole Paultre Bell, told supporters at a rally in Manhattan’s Harlem neighborhood. “Every protest, every march, every rally, I’m going to be right up front.”

If history is a guide, the family may indeed still have a chance at extracting some measure of retribution, but it would very likely come at the expense of the city and not the officers who pulled the trigger. Bell, 23, was killed and two friends wounded in a 50-shot barrage outside a Queens strip club hours before his wedding.

Legal experts said Bell’s family faces an uphill fight in their attempt to have the officers charged with federal civil rights violations and might have to settle for battling them in civil court, where the city, not the officers, would be responsible for paying off any multimillion-dollar verdict.

Peter J. Neufeld, an attorney who represented police torture victim Abner Louima, said he believed the chances that the U.S. attorney’s office would bring federal charges in the case were “close to zero,” judging by Justice Department decisions in past police shootings.

Though federal prosecutors have been willing to prosecute police officers for civil rights violations before, most famously in the case of Los Angeles brutality victim Rodney King, they have hesitated to take on cases in which officers have had to make a quick decision whether to open fire on a person they perceived to be dangerous.

No civil rights charges were brought in the 1999 case of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed African immigrant shot to death in the vestibule of a Bronx apartment building by officers who mistook his wallet for a gun. They also were not brought in the case of Eleanor Bumpurs, a mentally ill, 66-year-old black woman who was killed by two shotgun blasts fired by a police officer evicting her from her apartment in the Bronx in 1984.

“The split-second nature of the decision to shoot,” Neufeld said, makes it difficult for prosecutors to argue that the officers knowingly acted to deprive someone of a constitutional right.

Bell’s family and the two survivors of the shooting may have better luck, though, with their lawsuit against the city. His companions that night were Joseph Guzman and Trent Benefield.

New York has a long history of multimillion-dollar payouts as a result of lawsuits brought by the families of people slain or beaten by police.