NEW YORK -- Three police detectives have been found not guilty of all charges in the shooting death of Sean Bell, the groom-to-be who was killed on his wedding day outside a Queens strip club.

Officers Michael Oliver, Gescard Isnora and Marc Cooper were acquitted of all counts after Bell died in a hail of 50 police bullets. Bell, a 23-year-old black man, was shot just hours before he was to be married on Nov. 25, 2006. He was unarmed.

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Oliver, 36, and Isnora, 29, faced charges of manslaughter, assault and reckless endangerment. Cooper, 40, faced charges of reckless endangerment.

Justice Arthur Cooperman delivered the verdict in a Queens courtroom packed with spectators, including victim Sean Bell's fiancee and parents, as at least 200 people gathered outside the building.

Scores of police officers surrounded the courthouse to guard against potential chaos, and as news of the verdict spread, many in the crowd began weeping. Others were enraged, swearing and screaming "Murderers! Murderers!" or "KKK!"

Inside the courtroom, spectators gasped. Sean Bell's fiancee immediately walked out of the room; his mother cried.

Hours later, the Rev. Al Sharpton, who represents Bell's family, vowed to continue his fight for the victims and called for a federal investigation of the shooting.

"This verdict is one round down, but the fight is far from over," Sharpton said on his radio show. "What we saw in court today was not a miscarriage of justice. Justice didn't miscarry. This was an abortion of justice."

All three officers appeared at a news conference several hours after the verdicts were returned.

"I'd like to say sorry to the Bell family for the tragedy," Cooper said, thanking God, his lawyers and the police officers who supported him.

Michael Palladino, president of the Detectives Endowment Association, responded angrily to Sharpton's suggestion that the verdicts were unfair.

"That's despicable for him to say that because we have the greatest criminal justice system on earth," he said.After the verdict was announced, the U.S. attorney's office said it had been monitoring the state's prosecution and would conduct an independent review of the case.

We "will take appropriate action if the evidence indicates a prosecutable violation of federal criminal civil rights statutes," the office said in a statement.

In a statement, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said there were "no winners" in a trial in which "an innocent man lost his life." He urged New Yorkers to accept the judge's authority, even though they might disagree with his decision.

"There will be opportunities for peaceful dissent and potentially for further legal recourse -- those are the rights we enjoy in a democratic nation," Bloomberg said. "We don't expect violence or law-breaking, nor is there any place for it. We have come too far as society -- and as a City -- to be dragged back to those days."

Before announcing the verdict, the judge made a statement indicating that the police officers' version of events was more credible than the victims' version. "The people have not proved beyond a reasonable doubt that each defendant was not justified" in shooting the victims, Cooperman said.

Officers Michael Oliver, 36, and Gescard Isnora, 29, stood trial for manslaughter while Officer Marc Cooper, 40, was charged only with reckless endangerment. Two other shooters weren't charged. Oliver squeezed off 31 shots; Isnora fired 11 rounds; and Cooper shot four times.

A conviction on manslaughter could have brought up to 25 years in prison.

The case brought back painful memories of other NYPD shootings, such as the 1999 shooting of Amadou Diallo -- an African immigrant who was gunned down in a hail of 41 bullets by police officers who mistook his wallet for a gun. The acquittal of the officers in that case created a storm of protest, with hundreds arrested after taking to the streets in demonstration.

The mood surrounding this case has been muted by comparison, although Bell's fiancee, parents and their supporters, including the Rev. Al Sharpton, have held rallies demanding that the officers -- two of whom are black -- be held accountable.

The officers, complaining that pretrial publicity had unfairly painted them as cold-blooded killers, opted to have the judge decide the case rather than a jury.

The nearly two-month trial was marked by deeply divergent accounts on the part of defense lawyers and prosecutors.

The defense painted the victims as drunken thugs who the officers believed were armed and dangerous. Prosecutors sought to convince the judge that the victims had been minding their own business, and that the officers were inept, trigger-happy aggressors.

In his closing arguments, prosecutor Charles Testagrossa alluded to the starkly different views of the shooting.

"If you are a police officer or sympathetic to police officers, the defendants are tragic heroes and the victims are thugs," he said. "If you are friends of the victims, then the defendants are murderers."

None of the officers took the witness stand in his own defense.

Instead, Cooperman heard transcripts of the officers testifying before a grand jury, saying they believed they had good reason to use deadly force. The judge also heard testimony from Bell's two injured companions, who insisted the maelstrom erupted without warning.

Both sides were consistent on one point: The utter chaos surrounding the last moments of Bell's life.

"It happened so quick," Isnora in his grand jury testimony. "It was like the last thing I ever wanted to do."

Bell's companions -- Trent Benefield and Joseph Guzman -- also offered dramatic testimony about the episode. Benefield and Guzman were both wounded; Guzman still has four bullets lodged in his body.

Referring to Isnora, Guzman said, "This dude is shooting like he's crazy, like he's out of his mind."

The victims and shooters were set on a fateful collision course by a pair of innocuous decisions: Bell's to have a last-minute bachelor party at Kalua Cabaret, and the undercover detectives' to investigate reports of prostitution at the club.

The party, according to Bell's friends, was boozy but uneventful. But the undercovers were jumpy.

"I felt uncomfortable," testified Detective Hispolito "Hip" Sanchez, who with Isnora posed as a patron that night. "I just didn't feel good about it."

As the club closed around 4 a.m., Sanchez and Isnora claimed they overheard Bell and his friends first flirt with women, then taunt a stranger who responded by putting his right hand in his pocket as if he had a gun. Guzman, they testified, said, "Yo, go get my gun" -- something Bell's friends denied.

Isnora said he decided to arm himself, call for backup -- "It's getting hot," he told his supervisor -- and tail Bell, Guzman and Benefield as they went around the corner and got into Bell's car. He claimed that after warning the men to halt, Bell pulled away, bumped him and rammed an unmarked police van that converged on the scene with Oliver at the wheel.

The detective also alleged that Guzman made a sudden move as if he were reaching for a gun.

"I yelled 'Gun!' and fired," he said. "In my mind, I knew (Guzman) had a gun."

Benefield and Guzman testified that there were no orders. Instead, Guzman said, Isnora "appeared out of nowhere" with a gun drawn and shot him in the shoulder -- the first of 16 shots to enter his body.

"That's all there was -- gunfire," he said. "There wasn't nothing else."

With tires screeching, glass breaking and bullets flying, the officers claimed that they believed they were the ones under fire. Oliver responded by emptying his semiautomatic pistol, reloading, and emptying it again, as the supervisor dived for cover.

The truth emerged when the smoke cleared: There was no weapon inside Bell's blood-splattered car.

After an ambulance was summoned, the shaken detectives gathered in the middle of the street -- a scene the supervisor described as "surreal."

"We were all in shock," he said. "We thanked God that none of us were hit and we were going home."

In closing arguments, defense attorneys accused prosecutors of building their case on the unreliable testimony of Bell's friends. They noted that Guzman and Benefield both have criminal records and $50 million lawsuits against the city.

The pair were part of "a parade of convicted felons, crack dealers and men who were not strangers to weapons," said James Culleton, Oliver's attorney.

A lawyer for Isnora, Anthony Ricco, portrayed his client as an unjustly vilified hero who had exercised "enormous restraint" before pulling the trigger. But Testagrossa depicted the detectives as cowboys who wildly overreacted to some harmless trash talk. He suggested Oliver was the worst offender.

"Thirty-one shots," the prosecutor said. "Thirty-one separate pulls of the trigger. ... Thirty-one separate decisions to use deadly force. Thirty-one opportunities to pause and reassess whether continuing firing was necessary.

"Thirty-one opportunities to save an innocent life."