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The Bernie Goetz Story: 25 Years Later

Of the many cases of racial injustice in the Supreme Court, few have sparked as little outcry as the case of Bernhard Goetz, the so-called ‘subway vigilante’ of New York City that was acquitted of attempt of murder charges after shooting four unarmed black teens. This is a social misfortune because, in many ways, the Goetz case represents the epitome of society’s racism and the dangerous consequences of the ‘fight-violence-with-violence’ mentality. Few have bothered looking deep at the case and what it says about our culture. Although Al Sharpton gained some early fame thanks to the case, it remains largely ignored even by black leaders. On close examination, the lack of outrage over this case is easily accounted for. Not only were Goetz’s victims black but they all had criminal records. To many white Americans they were just thugs that got what they deserved. To many blacks the four young men had too tainted a background to serve as influential causes for change. They were not marketable enough for them to care about. With little protest, then, this miscarriage of justice went unchallenged.

The jury that acquitted Goetz of attempted murder charges was mostly white and many of them had been victims of assault. Everything about these four men, their criminal records, their residence (the Claremont Village projects in the deadly South Bronx), and their blackness, made them representatives of everything they feared and hated about New York City.

Goetz, on the other hand, was accepted as a spokesman for the fear-struck New Yorker. Prior to this incident he had had no problem with the law, kept to himself, and he was white. Defenders of Goetz can deny this all they want, but his whiteness was his ticket to freedom just as his victims’ blackness had been their condemnation.

The criminal background of the young men may have played a part as did their arrogant demeanor in court. But the idolization of Goetz (rather than a mere acquittal) and the hate letters sent to the families of the four young men (full of racial slurs and death threats) make it hard to dismiss the statement of Pastor Floyd Flake who said, “I think that if a black had shot four whites, the cry for the death penalty would have been almost automatic,” as hyperbole.

This article is not, however, an indictment of Goetz but of the culture of hate that excused his actions. Indeed, the jury seemed unmoved by a statement he made some time prior to the shooting in which he said that the only way to clean up 14th St. was to “get rid of the s***s and n*****s.” But had this just been a case of, as a woman from Harlem put it, “five fools” meeting and “one of them had a gun”, it could have been laid to rest by now. After all, as Malcolm Gladwell described him in The Tipping Point, Goetz was an obviously disturbed person and his actions, though tragic (especially for Darrell Cabey), could be put in perspective had this incident only reflected him. But this landmark case speaks not only for the people of New York but also for America as a whole.

I am not arguing in favor of denying anyone their right to self-defense. I simply don’t think that self-defense means taking the law into one’s own hands. It doesn’t mean fighting violence with violence and shooting unarmed teens as they are retreating from you is certainly not an act of self-defense. It is partaking in the cycle and only brings more destruction.

Finally, this article does not make excuses for the behavior of the four young men nor does it make them out to be innocent victims. I do, for the record, believe that they indeed intended to rob or extort money out of Goetz and their criminal record speaks for itself. Two years after the Goetz incident, one of the teens, James Ramseur, was convicted of raping a pregnant 19-year old girl at gunpoint in the rooftop of the building where he lived. They were not nice kids. But the justice system doesn’t defend nice people only. Our justice system is there for a reason. As egregiously flawed as it is, it is preferable to a self-righteous and emotionally unbalanced gunman taking the law into his own hands. The last thing a city as dangerous as New York was in the 1980s needs is an instigator of more violence.

            Everyone knows the apolitical facts of the story. At the time of the incident in 1984, Bernhard Goetz was a 37 year old electrician running a business out of his apartment. He was a tall and frail man, hardly a promising candidate to survive the crime wave engulfing the city. Indeed, Goetz had been the victim of an assault in 1981 when three black youths mugged him at Canal Street Station.

            Growing along with his fear was his anger directed at what he thought to be an ineffectual police force, hoodlums, and New Yorkers in general. After his initial assault, Goetz applied for a gun permit. When it was denied, he bought a gun illegally. On the afternoon of December 22, Goetz would vindicate his anger.

            As is usual with many victims of assault, Goetz developed a misguided disdain for the demographic of his attackers. This has always been the saddest side effect of violent crime because it causes an erroneous hatred toward innocent people. This is, unfortunately, too common to singularly criticize Goetz for, but it will play a key role in understanding the cult-like admiration he would receive as a result of his action among (mostly) white New Yorkers and the vilification of his victims. However one feels about Bernhard Goetz, there is no denying that he spoke on behalf of the thousands of New Yorkers fed up with the city’s crime wave.

            When he entered a subway car at 14th Street Station, Goetz encountered who to him weren’t humans so much as symbols of what put the city in the state it was. Across from him sat four African-American teenagers. Barry Allen, Darrell Cabey, and Troy Canty (all of them 19) and James Ramseur (18) had also hopped on the train on their way to an arcade to rob the machines. The remaining passengers were seated on the other end, keeping their distance from the young men because, as one of them would later say, they were “acting rowdy”.

            Canty approached Goetz and asked him, “How are you doing?”

            “Fine.”

            At this point, according to Goetz, Canty smiled and said, “Give me five dollars.”

            “What did you say?”

            “Give me five dollars.”

            Goetz pulled out the revolver he concealed beneath his windbreaker and opened fire on the four young men, who tried desperately to escape and hide among the terrified passengers. Allen, Canty, and Ramseur were hit first. Goetz then walked over to Darrell Cabey, who was lying on the seats, and either said or thought, “you don’t look so bad, here’s another” and shot Cabey in the spine, rendering him a paraplegic for life.

            Allen, Canty, and Ramseur recovered and were released from the hospital soon. Darrell Cabey underwent coma and brain damage before his release. He was never to walk again or think beyond the capacity of an eight-year-old.

            After a passenger pulled the alarm and stopped the train, Goetz left the car and ran off into the dark tunnel. For five days, Goetz hid around New England before turning himself in to the police in Concord, New Hampshire.

            Goetz was brought back to the New York by the NYPD and received a hero’s welcome. Supporters wore shirts with pictures of his face under the label “Thug Buster”. The Guardian Angels raised funds for his bail. As desperate as a city may be to alleviate crime, the lionization of Bernhard Goetz was a sickening mockery of justice.

            Few in this maddened crowd bothered to look at who exactly these young men were, what exactly had happened on the subway, or what their criminal records consisted of. In fact, before James Ramseur was convicted of sodomizing a young lady, their records consisted largely of petty crimes. But this was lost on Goetz’s backers. To them, what little they knew was all that mattered. They were black, they had some sort of a record, and they came from the South Bronx. Like the lynch mobs that formed in the beginning of the 20th century, this crowd simply wanted blood. Never mind that trying to eliminate violence with violence is warped logic. They wanted revenge at all cost and so did the jury.

            Goetz was charged with attempted murder, assault, reckless endangerment, and illegal possession of a firearm. But the jury acquitted him on all counts except the illegal possession of a gun and Goetz was sentenced to a year in prison, less than a slap of the wrist considering his actions. Like the crowd, the jury (made up mostly of whites) was motivated more by vengeance than justice. They were so blinded by their hatred that they wouldn’t even convict him of reckless endangerment on behalf of the other passengers that he could have killed.

            Goetz had no modesty in taking credit for reducing crime in New York, as if shooting four teens has a significant effect on a problem as big as urban crime. Besides, crime didn’t begin to decline in New York until 1991, seven years after the Goetz incident. The once timid and frail man turned into a shameless self-righteous promoter of vigilantism. His statements ranged from the self-incriminatory, “I wanted to murder them and make them suffer as much as possible”, to the absurd. While being picked up by NYPD officers in Concord, he expressed animosity towards New York and claimed to be upset by the officers’ New York accent.

            In truth, the parts of the story that bother me the most are not the statements of Goetz, who was clearly an emotionally disturbed individual. That Goetz had psychological problems is without question. Even Darnay Hoffman, his lawyer during the 1996 civil trial brought by Darrell Cabey and his family, admitted as much.

            What really bothers me is imagining what sort of country lets someone shoot four unarmed teens as they are trying to escape and still practically walk free. Certainly not England, as farmer Tony Martin learned in 1999. In August of that year, Martin shot two unarmed burglars that broke into his estate as they fled, killing the younger thief. Martin went to jail and was released only after a case was made questioning his mental state. Interestingly, in Ireland, a farmer named Padraig Nally would also be incarcerated after shooting and killing John ‘Frog’ Ward, a trespasser on his property in October of 2004. But in October of 2006, Nally’s conviction was quashed and he was released in December. The jury initially acknowledged the excessiveness of Nally’s action. The wrinkle in the case, however, was that Frog Ward was an Irish Traveller, a group widely disdained in Ireland. Because of this, Nally’s actions became acceptable.

            Like Nally, Goetz walked free because he had the good fortune that his victims were minorities. Claims of self-defense from his defenders are easily diffused by the fact that none of the young men were armed, they were trying to retreat, and, especially, that Goetz actually walked up to Darrell Cabey and shot him in the spine. There has been much debate whether Cabey had already been hit before when he received that final shot that would turn him into a paraplegic and whether or not Goetz actually said “you don’t look so bad, here’s another”, or just thought it. In the context of the incident these details matter little. The fact that Goetz walked up to a teen and shot him at point blank is enough indication that he went well beyond what is recognized as self-defense. Had he simply pulled out the gun and scared them away, I would have agreed that he was well within his right to self-defense and would have accepted the jury’s verdict of simply convicting him for a firearm violation.

            I also will not accept that Goetz was a quiet man minding his own business. A person avoiding trouble doesn’t walk into a train with an illegal firearm. A person who isn’t looking for trouble minimizes the scale of the confrontation. Make no mistake, Goetz was out that day with a statement to make.

            What does it say about our country when someone like Bernhard Goetz is not only pardoned but also celebrated by so many? What does it say about our respect for the Constitution? More significantly, what does the Goetz case say about race relations in contemporary America? Is there anyone who really doubts that had the victims been white, the shooter would have at least had a harder time going free? To contradict this, many defenders of Goetz point to the case of Austin Weeks, the 29-year-old African-American who shot and killed Terry Zilimbinaks, one of two teenagers who had been screaming racial slurs at him on a Brooklyn subway in 1980. A predominantly white jury also acquitted Weeks. However, a case could be made that it was more of a PR move on behalf of the jury than a heartfelt conclusion. At the time of the Weeks trial, racial tension had escalated to a boiling point in New York. Had a largely white jury convicted a black man for shooting a white boy who had been harassing him with racial slurs, riots would have been inevitable. Ironically, I think that Austin Weeks should have done time for shooting an unarmed teenager. Both the Goetz and the Weeks cases prove that verdicts motivated by a desire to make a statement often lead to grave miscarriages of justice.

            It is hard to disagree with Al Sharpton who led an investigation seeking if the civil rights of the four young men had been violated. Ron Kuby believed so enough to serve as attorneys for Darrell Cabey and his family when they filed a civil suit against Goetz which was finally tried in 1996. The jury (now composed mostly of minorities), found that Goetz had acted recklessly and awarded Cabey $43 million for pain and suffering. Goetz filed for bankruptcy, but the message is what counts.

            If nothing else, the verdict against Bernhard Goetz in 1996 proved that there is hope in the American justice system. More importantly, Ron Kuby brought to light the racial bias that motivated both Goetz and the first jury. A famed civil rights lawyer, Kuby revealed that Goetz not only wanted to murder the teens but also had expressed his desire to gauge out Troy Canty’s eyes with his keys. Kuby then said that the statement to be inferred from the previous jury’s verdict is that the life of black teens “doesn’t matter.” That’s where Kuby was wrong, as the race of the four teens mattered a lot to that jury. To them, the fact that the four young men were black made all the difference in the world.

About the Author

I was born in Dorchester, MA on January 8, 1983 and though I was raised and live in Boston. All my life, writing has been my primary sustainment. Writing, of course, and my love for reading, cinema, and travel.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, October 9th, 2008 at 10:03 am and is filed under Arcade Equipment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.