The Queens district attorney, Richard A. Brown, praised Wednesday’s ruling.  “Today’s decision reflects that which we said all along,” Mr. Brown said in a statement, “that a fair and impartial jury can be selected from among the 2.3 million residents of Queens County.”  Michael Palladino, president of the Detectives’ Endowment Association, said he was dismayed by the ruling.  “Both the evidence and our arguments were powerful and had merit,” he said. “However, the court has spoken, and we will prepare for trial in Queens. Neither innocence nor guilt of our detectives was decided today.”  The decision appeared to dispel fears among supporters of Mr. Bell’s family of a repeat of what happened in the murder trial of four officers who killed Amadou Diallo, an unarmed African immigrant, in a hail of 41 bullets outside his apartment in the Bronx. That trial was moved to Albany because of pretrial publicity, and the officers were acquitted in 2000.  While Mr. Diallo and Mr. Bell were both black, comparisons between the two shootings have never been neat or simple. The officers who shot Mr. Diallo were all white, but two of the detectives charged in the Bell killing are black, including the one who fired first. And while Mr. Diallo died after reaching for his wallet, Mr. Bell, the police have said, was trying to ram the officers with his car. Thousands of people were arrested during protests over the Diallo shooting.  Nonetheless, the Rev. Al Sharpton, who has appeared at rallies at the side of Mr. Bell’s family and fiancée, Nicole Paultre Bell, praised the decision as a civil rights victory.  “Though this does not give an advantage or disadvantage for any of the involved parties, it does take the stain of an unfair and uneven playing field from at least the geographic questions that surround these trials,” Mr. Sharpton said in a statement, calling the trial date “Super Monday in the civil rights movement around this country.”  Lawyers for the three detectives said that pretrial publicity had hopelessly skewed public opinion against their clients. The lawyers conducted a poll of 600 prospective jurors suggesting that 60.5 percent believed the shooting to be “unjustified.” In a poll by the prosecutors, only 35.5 percent of potential jurors “report having formed an opinion about this case.”  The defense must now decide whether to waive a jury trial before Justice Arthur J. Cooperman and seek a bench trial instead.  The four justices of the Appellate Division of State Supreme Court in Brooklyn who delivered the ruling were Thomas A. Dickerson, Anita R. Florio, William F. Mastro and Howard Miller.  A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: Court Rejects Venue Change In Police Killing. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
The ruling by a New York state appeals court clears the way for jury selection in the 2006 killing of Sean Bell to begin in Queens on Feb. 4.