People v. Bernhard Goetz, Retried

This case was decided long ago. The record is reopened here, and you sit as jurors on the facts as they were proved, not on what any court concluded.

On December 22, 1984, a downtown 2 train ran through Manhattan carrying a light Saturday load, roughly fifteen to twenty passengers in the car. Bernhard Goetz, 37, an electronics technician, boarded and sat down. He had been mugged once before, injured, and had applied for a pistol permit. The application was denied. He carried a .38 caliber revolver anyway, unlicensed, five rounds loaded.

Four young men were on the car: Troy Canty, James Ramseur, Barry Allen and Darrell Cabey, all of them 18 or 19. All four were Black; Goetz is white. Two of them carried screwdrivers in their coat pockets, later described as tools for opening video game machines. The screwdrivers were never displayed.

The four approached Goetz. Canty said, "give me five dollars." What that sentence meant is the first contested question in the case. The prosecution treated it as a request for money, unaccompanied by any weapon, threat, or touching. The defense treated it as the opening line of a robbery, delivered by four men who had moved to surround a lone rider in that thinly occupied car, and argued that any experienced subway passenger would have understood it exactly that way.

Goetz stood. He drew and fired five shots in a matter of seconds. Four of the young men were struck; one shot missed. What happened next is the second contested question. In his taped confession to police in New Hampshire, Goetz said he had established what he called a pattern of fire, moving left to right. He said that when he came to the fourth man he told him he seemed to be all right and that here was another, and fired again; accounts of the tape render the exact wording with small variations, and the jury heard the recording itself. He said his intention was to make them suffer, and that if he had had more bullets he would have kept shooting. Darrell Cabey was paralyzed. Whether the shot that severed his spinal cord was the final one described in the confession or an earlier one in the volley was disputed by expert testimony at trial.

Goetz spoke briefly to a conductor, then left the train and the city. He surrendered in Concord, New Hampshire nine days later.

The legal standard is the one the New York Court of Appeals set out when the case came before it. Deadly physical force in self-defense is justified only if the defendant reasonably believed such force was necessary to prevent a robbery or the imminent use of deadly force against him. That belief must be honest, and it must be objectively reasonable. Reasonableness is measured against what a reasonable person in the defendant's situation would have believed, which permits the jury to weigh his physical circumstances, what he knew of the men before him, and any relevant prior experience, including having been mugged.

The prosecution's theory is that the response was wildly out of proportion to a five dollar request, that it continued after any threat had ended, and that Goetz's own recorded words establish an intent the defense cannot survive. The defense's theory is that four men closing on one is a robbery in progress, that the shots came in seconds rather than in deliberate stages, and that a traumatized man's rambling on tape is not a confession of murder.

Did Bernhard Goetz reasonably believe deadly force was necessary?

We do not ask you to pretend 1984 was a safe year. We ask you to hold that fear is not a license. Troy Canty asked for five dollars. No weapon was drawn. No hand was laid on the defendant. Nothing in that record justifies emptying a revolver into four human beings. And remember what the standard measures: the circumstances known to the defendant. Goetz never saw a screwdriver that night; he learned of them afterward. What he did not know cannot make his belief reasonable.

Consider what the defendant told police in his own voice. He described a pattern of fire, left to right, executed deliberately. He described returning to the fourth man, appraising him, and firing again. He said he wanted them to suffer. He said he wished he had more bullets. Those are not the words of a man reacting; they are the words of a man finishing something.

The standard permits you to place a reasonable person in his situation. It does not permit you to place a reasonable person inside his rage. A man who has been mugged may be afraid. He may not execute the frightened. Darrell Cabey will not walk again, and the reason is on tape.

Four men rose and closed on one seated passenger in a car with a scattered handful of riders. Two carried screwdrivers. One demanded five dollars. Ask yourself honestly what you would have concluded in that car, in that year, on that line.

The law does not ask what a scholar would think afterward with a transcript in hand. It asks what a reasonable person in Bernhard Goetz's situation would believe. His situation included being surrounded, being outnumbered four to one, and having been beaten and injured in a prior mugging after which the man arrested was quickly released. That is experience, and the Court of Appeals said you may weigh it.

The prosecution's case rests on a tape made by an exhausted man nine days into flight, talking without a lawyer, performing a hardness he plainly did not possess. The shooting itself took seconds. There was no pause for reflection because there was no time for reflection. Judge the four seconds on that train, not the hours in that police station.