Readers of a certain age will remember the incident, a true-crime drama from 1984. The so-called Subway Shooter was Bernhard Goetz, then a 34-year old New Yorker who was riding the subway when a teenaged Black man, whom Goetz did not know, demanded $5. The young man was accompanied by three friends, all Black and teenaged. What ensued from that encounter riveted the nation, in a way that the O.J. trial, eleven years later, was to do again, albeit on a much larger scale.
Goetz was carrying a gun for which he did not have a license. He end up shooting all four of the Black men; one of them was left permanently paralyzed. Goetz turned himself in. At his sensational trial, he was found not guilty by the jury of all charges, except for one: possession of a loaded gun without a license, for which he was sentenced to six months in jail.
The case stirred the same racial divisions we see all the time today. Blacks and liberals argued that Goetz was an angry racist who went out looking for trouble. His defense countered that he was frightened by being surrounded by four young, strong-looking Black men. Goetz’s defense was essentially an early version of “stand your ground,” which George Zimmerman used in his trial for shooting and killing Trayvon Martin, in 2012.
The New Yorker staff writer, Adam Gopnik, has written an excellent summary of the Goetz case in the Jan. 19 issue of the magazine. Self-defense, as a legal defense, is a murky one. One person might argue that a shooter exaggerated the threat to himself, and was motivated instead by racial anger. Another person might ask, reasonably, if the shooter was supposed to just stand there and wait for the attack to ensue, rather than trusting his instinct and striking before it began. There are geographic variables, too. A case involving, say, a rural Idahoan might evolve very differently from one in Oakland: juries in both places bring their own set of biases and expectations, so that the Idahoan might be found not guilty while the Oakland shooter would be locked up.
The question of whether Bernhard Goetz was entitled to shoot the four Black men has no determinative answer. A New York City jury said he was so entitled, so that’s that. But were the case to be repeated today, Goetz might still be sitting behind bars, 41 years later. All we can do is answer for ourselves what we might have done under similar circumstances. Progressives have argued that Goetz could easily have gotten off the subway or changed cars if he had felt threatened. This is obviously true: I’ve changed BART cars plenty of times where there were creepy freaks onboard. On the other hand, what has become of our society when aggressive thugs are able to commandeer a subway car and compel innocent riders either to leave, or to stand their ground and defend themselves? And by the way, all four of the Black men had prior criminal records.
This is what the debate about crime and race boils down to. It’s unfortunate that race gets stirred into the pot so often, but there’s a reason for that, which is proven by all statistics. If you had been on the Goetz jury, how would you have voted?
Steve Heimoff