"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.

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