The Rev. Al Sharpton goes on trial today for his May disorderly-conduct arrest at a Sean Bell shooting protest, but a judge said he won’t let the proceeding turn into a referendum on police brutality.
“I don’t want to get involved in a long trial on police misconduct,” Manhattan Criminal Court Judge Larry Steven said yesterday, refusing a bid by lawyers for Sharpton and his fellow protesters to argue that their clients’ traffic-blocking protests were a justified response to cop brutality.
Today’s bench trial should be brief, since Sharpton and his five co-defendants have agreed not to contest prosecutors’ accounts of their arrests.
But Sharpton did take the stand briefly yesterday on behalf of a co-defendant arrested after blocking traffic at the Midtown Tunnel.
“We wanted to express our outrage and to make sure there would be no violence,” Sharpton testified on behalf of co-defendant Anthony Estes, 45, of Queens.
Sharpton and his co-defendants were among some 200 arrested in demonstrations at the Midtown Tunnel, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Holland Tunnel, the Triborough Bridge and the 59th Street Bridge. Sharpton, arrested near the Brooklyn Bridge, should learn tomorrow whether he’s going to jail for up to 15 days.
Of those arrests, prosecutors offered to dismiss the charges for all but Sharpton and his co-defendants because of their records of multiple protest arrests.