NEW YORK — On the morning of April 25, a judge acquitted three cops who pumped 50 bullets into 23-year-old Sean Bell’s car in November 2006 just hours before his wedding. The released murderers, Michael Oliver, Gescar Isnora and Marc Cooper, were just three of five New York police who murdered Sean Bell and attempted to kill his two friends Joseph Guzman and Trent Benefield, but were the only ones charged.
While Sean Bell, who was to be marrying his high school sweetheart that morning, died instantly from the barrage of 50 bullets, his two friends survived with near-fatal injuries. Instead, they spent the next couple weeks handcuffed to hospital beds in police custody.
The cops who murdered Sean Bell initially told a story of another passenger in Bell’s car who supposedly shot at them first. Then they changed that story and said they thought Guzman pulled a gun. Then at the trial, the story finally transformed into them defending themselves because they thought Sean Bell would run them over with his car.
Dictatorship: rule without regard to law
Arthur Cooperman, the judge who acquitted the killer cops of charges of manslaughter, assault and reckless endangerment said that he had problems with the fact that some of the witnesses had been convicted or incarcerated before and with the “demeanor” that some of the witnesses had on the stand.
The reality is that the outcome of this case is consistent with what is seen throughout the United States where police murder Africans on a regular basis, and the courts consistently rule that they were justified in murdering our brothers, sisters and children.
These outcomes have nothing to do with justice. It doesn’t matter that U.S. law says that everyone is due a fair trial and are innocent until proven guilty.
The reality is that the white ruling class maintains a dictatorship in the United States. It rules without regard to law.
This is why the murder of an unarmed 17-year-old named Marquell McCullough in St. Petersburg, Florida after police cornered him and shot 19 bullets at him can be deemed justified. That’s why 14-year-old Shaquanda Cotton could be sentenced to seven years imprisonment for allegedly pushing a hall monitor at her school in Paris, Texas when she was the one who suffered injuries at the hands of the monitor. That is why even after two mistrials in the case of the Liberty City Seven, the State is determined to continue to play Russian roulette with the lives of these seven young Africans, pulling the trigger until it can find a jury to convict them of the fabricated charges of sedition against them.
It is a dictatorship of the white ruling class that, regardless of what is written in the law books, will carry out whatever meets its interests, be it the murder or the imprisonment of Africans to maintain the parasitic system that requires a politically subject, economically dominated African population for its continued existence. The Sean Bell case is part and parcel of that system.
Those with power define justice
A wrongful death lawsuit has been filed against all five of the cops that murdered Bell by his fiancé, Nicole Paultre Bell, and his surviving friends Joseph Guzman and Trent Benefield. The reality is, however, that there is no justice to be found in U.S. imperialist courts. The only time that the State will give any justice in the courts is when it understands that it may have to pay a consequence if it doesn’t.
Justice will only be found when the African working class is organized to defend its own interests, and when African people ultimately grab the power to make justice for ourselves.
Jail the killer cops!
Reparations to the family of Sean Bell!
