Courts Become Streetwise

"Would Bernhard Goetz have gotten off if he were Black and his victims were white?" seems to be the key question surrounding the now celebrated subway gunnings.

At first it seems odd that something so irrelevent to the facts of the case would take up the not-so-valuable time of commentators on this month's not guilty verdict for Goetz. Weren't there enough actual problems raised by the case--questions of the applicability of confessions, and the bounds of self-defense--without dealing with the larger, tangential issues of racism? While the facts are crucial, there are also good reasons why critics have focussed on the hypothetical.

Cases involving issues of race are today no longer as clear cut as they were when the Supreme Court rendered its landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education, writing that separate schools were not equal. Today, courts debate whether statistics can prove a racist justice system, even if there is no particular person who can show that he has been wronged. The Rosa Parks age has passed.

So too, the Goetz case is not remotely like a lynching, but is rather the overreaction of a paranoid crime victim; a victim whose attackers were Black. It is precisely because there is no certain culprit--only a frazzled electrical engineer and a violent society--that this case is argued in terms of the hypothetical.

But the verdict in the Goetz case does present an example of how subtle racism--the kind that is captured in statistical surveys--can play itself out in a tangible way. When courts consider the racially-linked paranoia of a crime victim, race becomes an issue. When courts indulge this paranoia, the verdict has aspects of race.

The principal reason for the verdict, and the salient feature of the Goetz trial is that the jury defined self-defense in terms of Goetz's own disturbed mind. Thus, the jury was forced to consider justice, not in terms of objective standard--which may be free of racial motivations--but in the terms of a frightened city dweller who had previously been mugged by Blacks. There was no effort made to describe the appropriate response when four tough looking men of any color surround a person on the subway.

In a city with racial tensions, we cannot allow for excessive response, especially if partly motivated by hatred of Blacks. In his confession, Goetz did not espouse self-defense, but revenge. He shot one of his aggressors in the back.

But once we cater to a person's fears, we introduce society's own problems into the court; the law of the street, becomes the law of the courts. It is not unusual that 12 New Yorkers would take a down-to-earth approach to the law. Subway riders all, they know the fears that come from riding underground, and appeared to think it hypocritical to send someone to jail for overreacting to a position that any subway rider could find himself in.

But by introducing Goetz's distorted perception of New York City into the courthouse they accepted the racially-clouded judgment of a terrified New Yorker, and dignified it as if it were law. Is riding the subway really a psychological drama, where a person when threatened is able to act on his fears with a gun, and be absolved?

Race relations are necessarily going to be effected by this verdict, because not only is a gnawing fear of "tough" Blacks now an acceptable code to govern walking the streets, so is fear of scrawny, bespectacled engineer types, who look like they may freak out and shoot you. What is to be gained by having everyone's fear become a legitimate basis for subway shootings? True, race enters the Goetz case only because society is racist, but there should be some point where racism can not be a justification for action; that place is the courtroom.

The Goetz trial has become so popularized because it seems to be tangible evidence of underlying racism in the legal system; a case in which a white man was treated sympathetically and was given the benefit of the doubt. It seems to be an identifiable--though complex--episode that takes statistics off government charts and into the streets and the subway cars.

Whenever legal principles are culled from the head of a troubled victim of crime, the legal system is worse off.