(Denis Hamill)It's one for the books. "I never saw a case prosecuted like this," Marvyn Kornberg, the noted defense lawyer, said several times during the Sean Bell trial. "It's a throw-everything-at-the-wall approach." Stephen Murphy, who won the only acquittal in the sensational Howard Beach trial in the very same Queens courtroom 21 years ago, is still scratching his head. "I've thought all along that these cops were going to be acquitted because the prosecution made major blunders in the case," he said. "To start with, the prosecution should never have read the grand jury testimony of the three cops into the record because it basically precluded the defendants from taking the stand." Murphy says once the cops' versions of the shooting were on the record in the trial, there was no way the defense was going to expose them to cross-examination. "If the prosecution hadn't done that, the defense would have seriously had to consider making their clients take the stand," Murphy said. I couldn't find a defense lawyer who could explain why the prosecution never prepared their star witnesses for crossexamination concerning their conflicting statements to police, prosecutors and the grand jury. "Most of the star witnesses contradicted themselves in major, material ways throughout the trial," Murphy said. "Sometimes their statements were tape-recorded. Or written in the DA's own notes. "The prosecution also put on police witnesses who developed sudden amnesia. Most of the major prosecution witnesses, the police and friends of Sean Bell helped the defense more than the prosecution. It's incredible that an NYPD lieutenant testified that after the shooting he never bothered to ask his men what happened." Another lawyer, who preferred to remain nameless, who used to work for the Queens district attorney's office, said politics is the only reason the case was brought to trial. He said there was an angry split in the Queens DA's office over bringing an indictment. One faction led by Jack Ryan, Queens District Attorney Richard Brown's top aide, argued that there wasn't enough evidence. The other faction said prosecutors owed it to Sean Bell's loved ones, the shooting victims and "the community."

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