The Unjust World of Bernhard Goetz
Tucker, William
William Tucker THE UNJUST WORLD OF BERNHARD GOETZ But it helps to have Barry Slotnick for a lawyer. The other day I was talking to a neighbor of mine in Brooklyn. He's a nice,...
...One of the jurors called me up and said, 'Hey, you tricked us on that...
...They were just going to keep putting him in jail...
...The D.A.'s were dumbfounded...
...Slomick called this approach "ingenious statements in improbable situations...
...Every neighborhood in the city would have wanted to give the jurors a ticker-tape parade...
...Where does the public fit into all this...
...That's what they do now," the 16-yearold Harlemite said...
...Far more important, the justice system is a dramatic forum in which a society's concept of right and wrong, conform with the law on searches and seizures, the evidence may still be admissible...
...Because none of these people "balanced" the story into the familiar stereotypes, the press gradually moved over to one Rev...
...This self-imposed abdication by the justice system is nothing more than an invitation to a new "arms race" between criminals and their victims all across America...
...And if I get shot in the spine, then I get welfare...
...Sharpton's main virtue was that he spoke in the reassuring fulminations of the 1960s...
...Getting either the four youths or Goetz to testify would mean getting either of them to waive their immunity or giving up the case against them altogether...
...The system can't punish anyone...
...I practically admitted my client's guilt," he said, "but I told the jury that if they convicted him, no one would ever take a job as a New York City policeman again...
...He seemed determined to make the system work right, even if it meant making it work upon himself...
...It wasn't exactly as Orwell imagined it...
...I wouldn't have minded a trial," Slotnick told me...
...They are often the least informed body in the courtroom...
...I know I've imagined doing it myself many times...
...That's what who does now...
...Granted, you don't have to go far on the subways to encounter young thugs, but is lying in wait for them with a loaded revolver really "self-defense...
...You can't Goetz seemed determined to make the system work right, even if it meant making it work upon himself...
...Something very eerie, frightening, and ultimately tragic is going on in New York City right now...
...Moreover, 46 percent of blacks thought crime in New York was worse than anywhere else, while only 33 percent of whites felt the same--a figure that obviously reflects black people's more frequent encounters as victims...
...Most important, the people who are most at risk are not the cab-hopping columnists who babble about criminals as '~merica's first line of defense in the battle for civil liberties...
...In a lengthy piece in the New York Times last September, Brown recorded one of his confrontations: Manchild 1984 is the product of a society so rife with violence that killing a mugging or robbery victim is now fashionable...
...Like all youths who don't have readily available male role models, they think violence is the mark of a "real man...
...I said to him, 'Let's not run to jail, let's just walk.' I explained to him how this 'immunity bath' works, and told him to go ahead and testify...
...good and evil, can be played out in full public view every day...
...Judges rarely meet the victims of crime...
...I would bet it will be plea-bargained out to something like two-years' probation...
...My client is not a racist, nor did he violate anyone's civil rights," announced Kelner, already preparing for the federal case...
...Colombo went on the stand and said nothing, so they put him in jail for a month for contempt of court...
...He was just stealing from them...
...When he got out, they started the same thing all over...
...For two days, judges and attorneys whined about the "bad impression" the public was getting of them...
...indictment...
...As a result of these proceedings, the grand jury failed to indict Goetz for attempted murder...
...It was possible that Goetz could be indicted for murder...
...One carried a child's baseball bat...
...The conclusion that criminals and their potential victims will draw are obvious--anyone can get away with anything...
...They shut out common sense at every turn...
...Incredibly, it managed to turn a situation that had galvanized every New Yorker's outrage against crime into just another dreary "racial incident...
...The ethics revolved around when and where to use it...
...Brown concluded: This is the new manchild enigma...
...Lars-Erik Nelson, the Daily News's most staunchly liberal columnist, probably offered the keenest insight: If Goetz" had shot four youths attempting to murder him, he would have been a momentary celebrity...
...I'm glad Goetz shot them," Royko pronounced...
...The interesting result is that, when the race of the attacker is not specified, you generally assume the individual must have been black...
...The jury let them go...
...You have to offer the jury an alternative interpretation to what they're hearing...
...If there was anybody in New York who didn't immediately regard Goetz as a hero, they were being awfully quiet about it...
...I've tried to reason with him, warning him that he might kill an innocent person...
...Three blacks strolled into the car as the train was moving...
...Society can be burning down around them-murders can be committed right in the back of the courtroom--and they will be entirely oblivious...
...He is so deadly and cynically rational that he is terrifying...
...The great "reforms" of the system over the past twenty-five years--the Miranda rule on confessions, the exclusionary rule on searches and seizures--have actually been carefully crafted tactics to reduce the jury's role in trial procedures...
...By now, he was collecting considerable support...
...Then we'd see if there would have been an indictment...
...I have yet to meet a judge in New York who thinks there is anything wrong with the system-except for two things: first, that prosecutors have too much power...
...They've all been mugged by now...
...Everyone dies of boredom while the lawyers try to secure "a jury that is impartial in my favor...
...But when the state brought charges of grand larceny shortly afterwards, Slotnick had them killed as double jeopardy...
...So what's the problem...
...It is perfectly obvious that, in committing crimes, these kids are doing one thing...
...In 1984, the question wasn't whether you should carry a gun with you on the subway...
...He pulled out a large revolver and began screaming at the boys...
...Judges, of course, don't know any of this yet...
...It turned out that he had built a significant portion of his career around being the "smart kid" for the Colombo mob--with lots of "pro bono" work thrown in...
...One 18-year-old convict became genuinely puzzled by Brown's attempts to turn him from crime...
...It would be twice as comforting to know this young cynic was doing a 30-year bit...
...The four punks looked for trouble and they found it...
...My client should be charged with grand larceny.'" The jury bought it...
...I already knew quite a bit about how the exclusionary rules work...
...One 16-year-old accused rapist was "ROR'd" with the instruction "not to go near this young girl again...
...Things would have been different if I was white like Bernhard Goetz...
...They are attempting to prove their manhood...
...and second, that the poor do not get good enough legal representation...
...A New York Times poll showed that whites approved of Goetz's action by 56-26 percent, while blacks supported it by 45-33 percent...
...That assault has changed his personality completely...
...He was protecting his face...
...He is not a vigilante...
...A jury of seven blacks and five whites would have deliberated for days before finding him innocent of attempted murder, but "I wish the roles had been reversed, so the perpetrator was black and the kids white," said Harlem Congressman Charles Rangel...
...We can "put ourselves in their place," but that doesn't mean they will act the way we want them to...
...They are growing up in a culture where 75 percent of all young people live without fathers...
...Even New York Times columnist Sidney Schanberg, who usually spends his time bashing landlords, admitted that people might be getting fed up with crime...
...They have created a small subculture in which the willingness to do random violence is only a matter of "having heart...
...It is there to protect it from criminals and violent people...
...Rather, they see an ongoing parade of surly, hostile youths--in New York almost all of them black or Hispanic--who are making a steady climb up the criminal ladder from petty poor people who are infinitely more likely to be aclual victims of crime...
...I wish the roles had been reversed, so the perpetrator was black and the kids were white," said Harlem Congressman Charles Rangel, who had not spoken previously on the incident...
...These are not the "juvenile delinquents" and car thiefs of yesteryear-the ones about whom sociologists are always saying we should "let them grow out of it" before "branding" them as "real criminals...
...On the day Goetz made bail, the one who had been paralyzed sank into a coma, and later lost higher brain functions...
...They've all been mugged by now...
...It was not to be...
...I've been raped more than once, robbed and beaten up on my way to work...
...Kelner, the attorney who was mugged in his driveway, is handling the motions...
...Predictably, Slotnick called this "a repeal of the Fourth Amendment...
...At the same time, I don't think Goetz ever would have been convicted...
...They charged the "white power structure" had fixed Goetz's case as if it were nothing more than a parking ticket...
...The released felons went on a crime spree that rocked New York...
...So he came to see me...
...But the kid he shot might have died by then, and with a dead body around 9 you never know...
...When his first attorney started cooking up an "insanity" defense, Goetz fired him...
...He was not entirely the hero people were making him out to be...
...Obviously New York had a lot of soul-searching to do...
...You don't let anything get by...
...The D.A...
...The key was New York's law on "transactional immunity," an odd system whereby a person called to testify before a grand jury is given blanket immunity for any crimes that are mentioned in his testimony...
...The only exception is when the attacker is white and the victim is black...
...Two of the youths had been shot in the back while running away...
...The constant report was that he only wanted to "tell his story and let the jury decide...
...The police set up a "hotline" looking for tips on "the suspect...
...He has been mugged twice--once in the driveway of his home on Long Island, and once in the men's room of his ofrice, where he was beaten unconscious...
...Then they beat him to the ground, slashing him through his suit coat, around his arms and Shoulders...
...You have to present them with a different way of looking at the facts...
...The THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1985 boys muttered and cursed, but they didn't give the appearance of wanting to stay and argue...
...Only a month before the 1983 conference, federal judge Morris Lasker had ordered 613 accused felons freed from New York City jails because he thought they were overcrowded...
...A vigilante is one who lies in wait for an opportunity to spring on somebody and take out his hate or vengeance...
...Instead, the courts handed down a totally unsatisfying verdict that only proved what everyone knew anyway--that the justice system can't punish anyone...
...I suspect the results are likely to be disastrous...
...But you gotta have dollars, right...
...They have walled themselves behind a barricade of procedural niceties and judicial "independence...
...Slotnick, for example, once defended a free-lance con man in Albany who had convinced the podiatrists of New York state that he could bribe the State Legislature into killing a bill that was going to eliminate podiatry from Medicaid coverage...
...So they sent him home...
...I don't know if they began harassing him, or if he beat them to the punch--it happened very quickly...
...A peaceful, shy, ordinary, humble human being with a .38 in his pocket...
...I had been talking to young men in the prisons and on the ghetto streets--prisons without bars--but I wasn't comprehending what they were telling me...
...Joseph Kelner, who finally won the non-trial portion, is a long-time liberal who represented the families of the victims at Kent State in 1970...
...Lawyers were falling all over each other for the chance to handle Goetz's case...
...These kids are unquestionably the "victims" of their circumstances...
...What judges and lawyers seem to have no concept of is that the justice system belongsto the public...
...That left Goetz...
...The average defendant appearing in Manhattan Criminal Court has seven prior arrests...
...Let there be no doubt about it...
...He once defended two Hassidic Jews who were part of a mob that put a would-be mugger in a coma...
...He warned of a "violent backlash from black youth" if Goetz was not convicted of attempted murder, and set up a vigil for the paralyzed youth, to which about twelve people came...
...The situation created a peculiar problem for District Attorney Robert Morgenthau...
...He refused outside offers to pay his $50,000 bail, and spent a week at Riker's Island, wearing the same suit of clothes, before finally bailing himself out on his own money...
...No wonder there are 300,000 outstanding fugitive warrants in New York City...
...A Harlem woman was raped within 24 hours by a man who had a nine-page criminal record, including seven prior convictions...
...Despite all the care that the newspapers take to disguise the facts, most petty muggings and "stranger" murders in New York THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1985 City are committed by young blacks or Hispanics...
...That wasn't fair,'" said Slotnick...
...Recalling the incident, I can't help but think that Bernhard Goetz was not really reacting properly to his situation...
...But Slotnick added another dimension to defense work I had only vaguely guessed at...
...Newspaper columnists and television commentators, rounding up the usual suspects, were astounded to find Roy lnnes, head of the Congress of Racial Equality and one of the country's oldest civil-rights leaders, offering to pay Goetz's legal fees even before he turned himself in...
...Curtis Sliwa, the founder of the Guardian Angels, vituperated against "attorneys who get a vicarious thrill in getting some punk off when they know he's guilty...
...Every criminal trial in this country now begins with an "evidentiary hearing," in which the judges and attorneys decide among themselves what portions of the case will be admitted before the jury...
...I've been studying the j udicial system in New York and around the country for about a year in preparation for a book I'm writing on crime...
...According to what I had gathered.., it was as though shooting the victim had become an integral part of the crime...
...He ordered them off the train as we were pulling into 42nd Street...
...guilty on the gun charge...
...You challenge everything," he started off...
...Instead, they were deluged with hundreds of calls expressing support...
...Within days, Rev...
...These are young hoodlums who are often committing major felonies by the time they are 15...
...If middle-class white people start acting like criminals, then they can get away with it, too...
...When these accused criminals are released pending trial, the judges always give them a fixed instruction that I find fascinating...
...He's a nice, mild-mannered fellow who has the lead in an Off-Broadway show called The Little Shop of Horrors, in which he plays a nice, mild-mannered fellow who raises plants that eat people...
...He was only charged with carrying an unlicensed gun...
...He wasn't protective enough...
...The rapist was easily apprehended because he had bragged to her that he was one of the criminals just let out in the "jailbreak...
...Judges are simply lost in the minutiae of the law...
...Constitutionally, the public is supposed to be represented by the jury--twelve average citizens chosen at random from the population...
...Both parties could be charged with commiting crimes...
...What has made him a hero is that he shot four insufferable thugs attempting a routine petty ripoff--the kind the cops and courts laugh at...
...To them, public fears about crime are only the concoctions of sensationalist newspapers...
...Maybe it was a bit worse...
...Sitting in the courtroom for days on end, I have seen obviously dangerous people turned loose while awaiting trial in a dreary procession of "ROR's" ("released on their own recognizance," meaning no bail...
...The subject was "The Criminal Justice System and the Public: Are They Communicating...
...He actually wanted to testify, but his attorneys talked him out of it...
...You can't win cases straight on--nobody wins cases straight on," he told me...
...The key to defense work, of course, is to exclude as much of the case as possible on technicalities...
...Business takes him to New York four or five times a year...
...Another letter to the Daily News said it all: I can't believe that Goetz got away with murder...
...Sharpton's apparent qualification for this meteoric rise from obscurity was that he was one of the last black people left in New York who wasn't fed up with crime...
...As soon as I got into his office, I knew I had stumbled into something big...
...But that didn't mean he was going to do it...
...which quickly degenerated into "Why Is the Press Saying Such Bad Things About Us...
...As Ernest van den Haag says: "For all the jury ever hears, they might as well be in Cloud-CuckooLand...
...Believe me, I've been in danger more than once But because I'm Puerto Rican I'd be in jail in a second if I were to take the law into my own hands...
...Slotnick explained to me how he owed his first big success as a criminal attorney to transactional immunity...
...The only way to enforce the law is to take it into your own hands...
...By sheer chance, Slotnick's picture had been on the front page of the newspaper that morning...
...Every day, Slotnick and Kelner had a new manifesto proclaiming his innocence...
...There were indeed many reasons for believing that Bernhard Goetz deserved to be prosecuted, and even convicted, for what he did...
...I told the jury, 'Sure, my guy was telling the podiatrists that he was going to bribe the legislature...
...The New York Times, for example, will never mention the race of the perpetrator, even while giving a detailed description of what he was wearing...
...Slotnick insists that he is going to let Goetz stand trial for the gun charge, but somehow I have my doubts...
...In practice, however, lawyers and judges have conspired to keep even the slightest element of randomness--and thus any true public representation--out of the process...
...called Colombo in and told him he was going to grant him blanket immunity in order to make him testify about his criminal activities9 For years they'd been calling these guys in, but none of them would ever talk...
...So what did the City Bar Association choose to talk about at its annual retreat...
...They sit on the bench dotting all the/'s and crossing the t's, and when they have a paragon of perfect penmanship they say, "There, I've done my job...
...Basically, I didn't want him to be questioned before the grand jury by a hostile D.A...
...Altogether, he told me, his trial record has been 69 acquittals, two convictions...
...At the same time, Judge Lasker was holding up the opening of 673 new cells on Riker's Island, because he thought they weren't safe enough...
...Fortunately, the Supreme Court has just tacked a "good-faith amendment" onto the exclusionary rule with regard to searches and seizures under the Fourth Amendment...
...No wonder criminals and attorneys get along so well...
...The Guardian Angels, the volunteer anti-crime patrols, who are almost entirely black and Puerto Rican, were raising bail money for Goetz, and marched in his support at Riker's Island...
...I had picked his name out of the phone book, along with a half-adozen others, to interview for my book...
...My client was a peaceful, shy, ordinary, humble human being...
...Consider, for example, this letter to the Daily News from a man in California, who wrote about his brother-in-law, a "gentle, kind man, and conscientious objector from the Korean War," who was robbed at gunpoint by four teenagers outside a Manhattan hotel in 1982...
...The criminal justice system has become a closed club, run of the lawyers, by the lawyers, and for the lawyers...
...The incredible truth the Goetz incident revealed is that just about every fourth person in New York has already been the victim of a crime...
...One of his concerns was that prisoners on the third tier of the cell block might fall over a railing and hurt themselves...
...They reached a quiet black man, fairly well-dressed, reading a newspaper...
...The jury bought it, and he was acquitted...
...Long-time liberal columnists were leading the chorus...
...All Hassidic Jews look alike," Slotnick told the jury, and argued that the police could not possibly have picked his clients out of the crowd...
...A much more sensible system would be the "use immunity" of the federal system, where a witness's grand jury testimony cannot be used against him but he can be prosecuted on the basis of other evidence...
...As Harvard crime expert James Q. Wilson commented: "There aren't any liberals left in New York...
...There is nothing society can do but punish such people...
...He raised several thousand dollars among them in the process, and was eventually charged with attempted bribery...
...We can sociologize and psychologize them to death ("crime is a way of life," "they're only imitating their peers"), but that doesn't make them any less dangerous...
...Jury selections at criminal trials can often take weeks...
...AI Sharpton, head of a previously unheralded group called the Brooklyn Youth Movement...
...In the hour I spent in his office, Slotnick showed me dimensions of criminal law that I had only vaguely imagined...
...Claude Brown, the 46-year-old author of Manchild in the Promised Land, which chronicled his own upbringing in Harlem during the 1940s, has been conducting long interviews with black street kids and prison inmates, preparing to write another book about contemporary ghetto life...
...I'm going to get .myself a gun and defend myself...
...Goetz, far from being a public hero, had simply become another shadowy reprobate hiding behind his lawyers...
...He has As Harvard crime expert James Q. Wilson commented: "There aren't any liberals left in New York...
...It was a trick," he admitted, "but it was a good trick...
...The FBI had just completed a big roundup of Mafiosi, and some of them were just gathering in his office when I arrived...
...Case closed...
...Mike Royko, the William Tacker is a contributing editor of Harper's...
...The four youths, of course, didn't want to give up their chance to get off the hook, so they refused to go before the grand jury...
...They were shouting and teasing the passengers in the car...
...Then race is mentioned explicitly, and the attack is described as "racially motivated...
...The one sure thing I've been able to conclude so far is that the justice system, and the people who run it, are totally inadequate to the task society expects of them...
...Then we'd see if there would have been an bo," he said...
...You've got to think of a theory...
...I'm sure we could have won...
...Each year, the New York City Bar Association holds a retreat in Westchester County for the city's criminal-justice establishment...
...Most good defense attorneys now consistently employ this strategy...
...The other day I was talking to a neighbor of mine in Brooklyn...
...They knew that as soon as he mentioned something, he couldn't be course, was that it looked as if Goetz was getting off because he is white...
...Comparing Goetz's volley to "the first shot fired at Lexington and Concord," Nelson quoted Lincoln as to the public's "revolutionary right to dismember and overthrow" the "absolute Despotism of the criminal justice system...
...Instead, it was decided the public "hadn't been properly prepared" for the mass release of criminals...
...Another time he defended a policeman who had been charged with violating the Fourth Amendment by placing an illegal wiretap on a suspected narcotics peddler...
...You mean shooting the victim is in style now like wearing a pair of Pony jogging shoes or a Pierre Cardin suit...
...They say: "You are not to commit any further crimes while you are out on your own recognizance...
...I got my big break in New York about 15 years ago, when the district attorney was trying to nail Joe Colomprosecuted for it...
...For more than a year, I was thoroughly baffled by the apparently senseless and often maniacal, rampant killings of mugging and robbery victims...
...I wasn't surprised at all, then, when I picked up the newspaper in January and read that celebrated criminal attorney Barry Slotnick would be heading up the trial portion of Bernhard Goetz's defense...
...The people who are most endangered are the millions of hard-working blacks and other been absolutely horrified at the things he is finding out...
...It wasn't until the last few hours of the conference that one lawyer finally wondered aloud if press coverage had really been all that bad...
...He carries a pistol with him now at all times...
...But at least the public would have had its say...
...Goetz, of course, was nothing if not a figure of rectitude...
...It's the only way to handle these guys...
...His gun was loaded with hollow-nosed bullets...
...If I die," he told Brown, "all my problems are solved, right...
...How long will it be before some self-appointed vigilante shoots a few innocent people--as Goetz himself easily could have done...
...Transactional immunity only benefits criminal defendants, but defense attorneys control several key committees of the State Legislature, so it has been very hard to dislodge...
...I asked, not understanding...
...Practically the only adult males they ever encounter are the junkies, pimps, pushers, and ex-prisoners who populate the streets...
...But his bitterness and rage have consumed him...
...Two carried short pieces of pipe, wrapped with electricians' tape at one end...
...The public is regarded, at best, as a nuisance--a gaggle of uneducated people who aren't qualified to make decisions, and "don't understand how the system works...
...Twice it happened on the train...
...The predictable result of all this, of THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1985...
...This public responsibility was overwhelmingly betrayed by the judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys in the case of Bernhard Goetz...
...Mayor Koch made a few cautionary remarks about "vigilantism," and got hundreds of letters from all over the country telling him to shut up...
...As Robert Frost once put it: "Society can never think things out:/It has to see them acted out by actors,/Devoted actors at a sacrifice...
...It was fairly obvious that he had been nursing a grudge, and that his attack had been more than just "selfdefense...
...I may be going out on a limb here, but at the moment Goetz fired his shots, I doubt if there were twelve adults in New York, rich or poor, white or black, who hadn't had the same fantasy...
...Last summer, I ended up in the offices of Barry Slotnick, one of New York's most successful defense attorneys...
...Shooting all four youths was surely excessive...
...It made me feel once again that, in New York at least, it's getting harder and harder to tell the difference between art and real life...
...In retrospect, it seemed miraculous it had never happened before...
...Perhaps the best measure of public opinion came from another letter to the Daily News, which was mildly critical of Goetz: A few months ago I was riding the subway about 2 in the morning on a weeknight...
...I opened it up with 'The Sting,'" Slotnick told me...
...The newspapers described Slotnick as a "brilliant courtroom tactician" who rarely loses a case...
...Another young mugger was freed because he demonstrated "community ties" by producing his THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1985 mother's phone number...
...The incident, of course, had enormous racial implications...
...I'm a Puerto Rican mother of three, and ride the subway all the time to work...
...I've never been able to understand the difference between a "mugging" and an "armed robbery," but the operational definition of a mugging seems to be "an armed robbery committed by a black teenager...
...scourge of Mayor Daley's law-andorder administration, said he had changed his mind about law enforcement after being robbed at gunpoint only a few months ago...
...But then he added, 'If I ever need a lawyer, though, I'U probably call you up.'" Slotnick had a whole bag of tricks...
...We had to spend hours and hours, but we finally convinced him," said Kelner...
...I was actually pleased to learn [this criminal] was serving a 15-year sentence...
...Keep in mind that this is a columnist who went right to the bottom with Walter Mondale's ship last November, and who hasn't said a nice thing about Ronald Reagan since he left Hollywood...
...When four black youths started harassing him for five dollars on the downtown IRT at one o'clock in the afternoon, he pulled out a gun and shot them, paralyzing one kid for life...
...The courts and the jury rooms are no longer a place where the public can find its instinctive sense of right and wrong reaffirmed...
...Yeah, it's wrong to kill somebody...
...Perhaps he was acting out a fantasy...
...William Tucker THE UNJUST WORLD OF BERNHARD GOETZ But it helps to have Barry Slotnick for a lawyer...
...At a New York hospital, his left eye had to be removed...
...On December 22, 1984, as all the world knows, a mild-mannered electronics engineer named Bernhard Goetz decided he was mad as hell and wasn't going to take it anymore...
...The "good faith" rule says that if the police act in "good faith" in trying to just rely on reasonable doubt...
...Without protest, he handed over his wallet and $3,000 in traveler's checks to the hoods...
...It is disturbing to consider that murder is the style among young muggers and that the style among the New York political liberal establishment is anti-capitalpunishment, and how well the two styles complement each other...
...When Goetz's bail was set at $50,000, several mugging victims offered to pay the whole thing...
...This isn't a case of bribery...
...What was most interesting about the Goetz incident, however, was that black people responded almost the same as white people...
...The lawyers proved once again to be far too clever...
...I have come to think of it as the "bizarre counter-interpretations" method...
...Perhaps what I was hearing was too mind-boggling, too ghastly to understand: "Murder is in style now...
...In any case, the trial on a gun charge will hardly have the emotional impact of a trial for assault or attempted murder...
...Colombo went on the stand and started answering questions...
...You know, you take their stuff and you pop (shoot) them...
...Sharpton was asking the Justice Department to prosecute Goetz on the grounds that he shot the four youths only because they were black...
...They have an oath of silence among themselves...
...I've had it," he told me, "I'm not taking any more of this crap...
...So the stage was set for a cathartic courtroom drama...
...What he was talking about, of course, were the many "exclusionary rules," those bizarre distortions of American justice which say that if the police have made any kind of procedural mistake in gathering the evidence--right down to a typing error on a search warrant--the evidence can be thrown out of the case as if it never existed...
...Could such deliberately attempted assassinations go unpunished...
...harassments and purse-snatchings to rape and armed robbery...
...Black politicians, who so far had been notably silent, were suddenly coming out of the woodwork...
...Neither of them ever knows when they are telling the truth...
...He walks along dark streets at night hoping sorneone will attempt to mug him again...
...Eventually, we have to put ourselves in our place--or at least their victims' place--and admit there are people out there who'd just as soon blow your head off as empty your wallet...
Vol. 18 • April 1985 • No. 4
