"A bunch of young people ran up behind me quickly, Mr. Ricco recalled. They wore pins for the New Black Panther Party. "One said, 'I want to ask you a question.' They’re asking me about the case. 'How could you?'"

Anthony L Ricco, the lawyer for the detective accused of firing the opening salvo in the hail of gunfire that killed Sean Bell in 2006, is black, and he's taking a whole lot of heat over his latest case. As Ricco tells The New York Times in their recent profile of him and the trial, it's irrelevant to the outraged masses that his client, Gescard F Isnora, is also African American; that he could literally defend yet another seemingly senseless killing of a black man by the NYPD has people — even Ricco's friends and colleagues — baffled. Perhaps counterintuitively, Ricco told the Times that bigotry is actually what propelled him to accept the case.

“The answer to it is very simple,” he said. “I thought about many of the young black men who were prosecuted and executed in small towns in the old South. Excellent white lawyers living in those towns were intimidated from getting involved with those cases. Would I fold to the community’s sense of outrage? I hope to think if I was a lawyer in those small towns, I would have stood up.”

But Ricco's detractors aren't just upset that he took the case. They're also angry with the manner in which he's defending his client, calling into question Bell's friends' criminal backgrounds and Bell's intoxication on the night of his death. "You need to think about going out on your wedding night and getting so damn drunk," says Ricco. Ricco also has a habit of slipping into colloquial English when it suits him:

He cajoled a friend of Mr. Bell’s who missed the argument that night because he was distracted by a dancer: “You was more interested with the girl.” To another friend, he said: “When you was in the bar, you were watching them girls on the stage. You wasn’t watching to see who was drinking, was you?”

Basically, Ricco is doing his job, and well at that. And yet there are still those who forget that justice — pure justice — must always remain colorblind, regardless of whether or not that tenet has been observed throughout history. Said one of the Black Panthers whom initially accosted Ricco: "He’s a betrayer. All day. Just by representing this man." An attorney for Sean Bell's parents is quoted as saying that Ricco is putting the "black community on trial." Informed of this by the Times reporter covering his story, Ricco, a Harlem resident his entire life, responded, "Am I on trial?"