Courtroom Ritual

Michael Brick: The courtroom filled past its capacity of 107. Row on row of uniformed officers stretched into the hall. The stenographer dropped her bulky brown purse onto a table, the clerk pulled a blazer over his holstered handgun, the judge frowned down on the crowd and took up his robe.



"Come to order," came the call in State Supreme Court in Brooklyn yesterday morning, and the spectacle began. The players took their marks for that most somber New York City courtroom ritual, a murder trial in the slaying of one of the city's 36,000 sworn police officers. Twice in as many years these scenes have played out in Brooklyn courtrooms, bringing sentences of life in prison for one killer…