Milwaukee ? After a jury acquitted three former Milwaukee police officers of severely beating Frank Jude Jr., thousands of people who had expected convictions wondered, “What went wrong?”

Jurors aren’t talking, so no one knows for sure. But some observers suggest it could have been a case of the prosecution having too few witnesses and credibility issues with their best ones. And the strategy prosecutors used to show the “code of silence” may have left them short in a numbers game that led to not guilty verdicts for Andrew Spengler, 26, Jon Bartlett, 34, and Daniel Masarik, 26.

“It was a cover-up case,” said Dist. Atty. E. Michael McCann, frustrated by his first defeat in a felony jury trial in his 42-year prosecuting career. “We brought it right out in front of them.”

But apparently they didn’t see it.

McCann presented much of the evidence through extensive, almost hostile interrogations of stonewalling police witnesses who said they never saw the defendants or anyone else beat Jude. McCann repeatedly invoked the phrase “police code of silence.”

That approach, he said, was necessary to help jurors understand why – when there were so many people at the party – there were so few accounts of what happened to Jude.

McCann called two people who appeared to be his star witnesses – the only two Milwaukee Police Department officers who said they did see who beat Jude – Joseph Schabel and Nicole Belmore, who responded to the scene. They each gave testimony damaging to the defense, and each said they’d suffered reprisals within the department for cooperating with prosecutors.

But the jury may have just been keeping a ledger count that favored the defense: Six officers said one thing, two said something else.

The two were the first on-duty officers to respond to the scene outside a party at Andrew Spengler’s house early on Oct. 24, 2004, in Bay View.

Jude had shown up at the party with three other people, but he left after a short time and was accused of stealing Spengler’s badge. A confrontation ensued in the street outside.

The defense also focused on a 911 call in which a woman who had come to the party with Jude, Kirsten Antonissen, tells a dispatcher that on-duty officers had joined in the beating.

At trial, Antonissen testified she didn’t remember what she saw, and Bartlett revealed, for the first time, that he remembered seeing Schabel kick Jude.

The defense contended two of the off-duty officers – Bartlett and Spengler – put themselves on duty to arrest Jude, whom they believed had stolen Spengler’s badge.

But the men did not beat Jude, jam anything in his ears, put a knife to his throat or yank back his fingers, their lawyers said.

The third defendant – Masarik – simply claimed he wasn’t there, but was inside Spengler’s house looking for a memo book.