Word: goetz
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CONGRATULATIONS! read the placard held high by a muscular white man in a checked shirt. BERNIE GOETZ WINS ONE FOR THE GOOD GUYS...
...Goetz is a Nazi!" shouted a nearby black...
That was the scene of shouting and shoving outside a Manhattan courtroom last week at the end of what Judge Stephen Crane called the "most difficult case of our time." After four days of deliberations, a jury of ten whites and two blacks had just acquitted Bernhard Goetz of all but one relatively minor charge in the 1984 shooting of four black youths who Goetz said had threatened him on a subway train...
Which brings us back to Goetz. What the jury decided was that the parameters for an individual's right to use deadly force in self-defense have been greatly expanded. If you are a young tough kid, carrying a potentially dangerous weapon, possessing a past history of criminal offenses, and you surround a subway passenger and ask him for money, it's open season on you. That's the issue that needs to be discussed. But too many critics of the Goetz opinion discount the fact that white hoods can travel in packs and harass Black people too. By their...
...viewing the Goetz case as a purely racial issue, we demean what it is to be human. The sole good becomes insuring that whatever whites can do, Blacks can do too--even if it means killing young people as a result of irrational fear. Is society so crime-ridden that it is just assumed that vigilantism is all right? And is our challenge now merely to ensure that racism not prevent Blacks from having the equal opportunity to act outside the law in self-defense? The recent flurry of commentary on the Goetz case suggests that we are at such...