Barry Allen, Troy Canty, James Ramseur and Darrell Cabey boarded the subway about 1:00 P.M. The boys, concealing screwdrivers, planned to visit a video arcade, where they hoped to steal quarters.  Each of the boys, 18 or 19 years of age and high school drop-outs all, had a criminal arrest record.  The other 15 to 20 passengers on the car, wary of the boisterous gang, moved toward the other end of the car.  At the 14^th Street station, Bernhard Goetz, age 37, entered the subway car and took a seat near the youths. 

When Canty and Allen approached Goetz with their demand for five dollars, they knew nothing of Goetz's history and how the intense man, dressed in jeans and a windbreaker, would soon transform their lives.  Three years earlier, Goetz had been mugged by three African-American young men and he had a permanently damaged knee to show for it.  He resolved not to be a victim again and regularly carried a .38 revolver in his waistband. 

Judge Stephen Crane opened the Goetz trial on December 12, but it would be the end of April before the first witness took the stand.  Jury selection took nearly four months, first a long process of "prescreening" potential jurors for bias, then two weeks of voir dire for those potential jurors who passed the first test.  On April 7, 1987, the last member of the seven-men, five-women jury was seated. 


District Attorney Gregory Waples told jurors in his opening statement that the evidence will show that Goetz shot one of the teens "in the center of the back as he tried to flee" and that Darrell Cabey was shot and permanently paralyzed while "sitting down in a subway seat,...absolutely helpless and doing absolutely nothing to threaten or menace Bernhard Goetz."  He said that Goetz's two confessions would reveal him to be a man with a "very twisted and self-righteous sense of right and wrong."  He concluded by telling the jurors, "You are here to decide whether the idea of equal justice under the law for all people is a reality or is an empty dream."

Attorney Barry Slotnick followed with the opening statement for the defense.  Slotnick painted his client as "neither Rambo nor a vicious predator," but rather as someone surrounded by threatening youths intent on robbing him and who, in response, took "proper and appropriate action."  He warned the jury to be skeptical of evidence presented by the two testifying witnesses, Canty and Ramseur because they had a motive to lie to further their pending multi-million dollars civil suits against Goetz.  He variously referred to Goetz's shooting victims as "hoodlums," "criminals," "savages," "punks," "low-lifes," and "thugs."  He told jurors that the four youths "assumed the risk that a citizen like Bernhard Goetz would lawfully, justifiably, fire a weapon in protection of his property." 


After two days of early scene-setting testimony from a paramedic, John Filangeri, who treated the shooting victims, and Detective Charles Haase, who investigated the shootings, the prosecution played for the jury Goetz's audiotaped confession made to Concord police officers.   Listening through wireless headphones, the jurors heard Goetz lament, "I wish this were a dream, but it's not."  He told detectives the shootings were unplanned.  "If this were premeditated," he asked, "why wouldn't I have simply put on a fake mustache and worn different glasses?"  He told Concord detective Christopher Domian that his prior mugging was "an education" that convinced him "the city doesn't care what happens to you" and you have to protect yourself.  Goetz said the "body language" of the teens told him he was in danger and that he went into "a different state of mind."  "You react," he explained, and remember that "speed is everything."  He admitted going over to a seated Darrell Cabey and telling him, "You seem to be all right; here's another" as he pulled the trigger for a fifth and final time.  Goetz fled after the shooting, he said, because if he stayed, "they would have wiped the floor with me." 

Troy Canty, dressed in a business suit, spent more than two days on the stand describing his version of events.  Under questioning from Waples, Canty admitted to heavy use of crack cocaine and convictions on several misdemeanor charges.  He explained that on December 22 he and the three other youths boarded the subway with the intention of going to Manhattan to rob video games at Pace University.  He testified that he was three or four feet away from Goetz when he asked him, "Mister can I have five dollars?" Goetz responded, "You can all have it!" According to Canty, Goetz then unzipped his jacket, pulled out his pistol, and began firing.  "I grabbed my chest," Canty testified, "then I fell to the floor."  He told jurors he heard subsequent shots, then the voice of Darrell Cabey crying, "Why did he shoot me?  Why did he shoot me?" 

On cross-examination, Canty admitted that he might have said "Give me five dollars" instead of "Can I have five dollars?"  He denied, however, telling a reporter for the National Enquirer, "If we get caught, we plea-bargain a felony down to a misdemeanor, then walk away."  He also denied telling an officer on the train, in the minutes after the shooting, "We were robbing the white guy and he shot us."  Slotnick questioned Canty about prior arrests or allegations concerning robberies and threats, then questioned the witness sharply about his possible monetary interest in the outcome of Goetz's criminal case, the civil suit he had brought against the shooter for the injuries Canty suffered in 1984.

Two of the three other shooting victims were called as state's witnesses.  James Ramseur, called the day after Canty finished his testimony, refused to take the stand despite having received immunity from prosecution.  When a court officer reached out with a Bible, Ramseur pushed it away.  Ordered by Judge Crane to take the oath, Ramseur, hands in pockets, stated, "I refuse."  The judge cited Ramseur for contempt and he was led out of the courtroom.  Barry Allen, who had not been granted immunity from prosecution, asserted his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself in response to nearly every question from both Waples and Slotnick.  Despite the constant invocations of the the Fifth Amendment privilege, Slotnick persisted in asking Allen question after question for over twenty minutes--in an apparent attempt to impress the jury with what he hoped they would see as Allen's unreasonable intransigence.

Amanda Gilbert attended to the injured young men after the shooting.  She testified for the state that on of the injured youths told her, "Miss, I've been shot through the heart and I'm dying." Gilbert assured him otherwise.  She testified that Darrell Cabey, leaning over in his seat told her, "I didn't do anything.  He shot me for nothing."  (After argument by attorneys, the judge ruled the statements by the shooting victims to be inadmissible hearsay and told the jury not to consider the statements in their deliberations.)

The prosecution called numerous eyewitnesses to the shooting--nine in all--to testify in the Goetz trial.  Victor Flores told jurors he noticed "a group of kids" about fifteen feet away from his seat on the subway car.  After the first shot rang out, he saw Goetz, in rapid succession, "shooting the kids in front of him."  He saw two of the youths fall to the floor and a third slump into a seat.  Goetz, he said, "looked like he was very mad" at the time of the shooting, but afterwards "seemed like he was worried."  Flores testified that he did not hear Goetz address Cabey or any of the other shooting victims.  Armando Soler, the conductor, described the scene after the shooting as "mass confusion: everybody was running for cover."  Goetz, however, "was just sitting there, very calm."  "I asked [Goetz] if he was a police officer," Soler testified, "and he said no."  Solitaire MacFoy testified that he witnessed Goetz take out his gun and, with "a calm and bland" and "somewhat calculating" expression, began firing very deliberately at each of the young men around him.

Oftentimes, the state's eyewitnesses hurt as much as helped the government's case.  Loren Michaels, a credit manager for a trading company, testified that before the shooting the young men "seemed to be kind of laughing and moving around on the seats."  On cross-examination, Michaels admitted that in his grand jury appearance he had characterized their activity as "a bit noisy and rude" and that he had considered at the time the possibility that the teenagers might be about to create some sort of disturbance.  Garth Reid was holding his child in a subway train seat when the shooting began.  He testified that he did not see any of the youths display any weapons or make any threatening gestures to Goetz before the bullets starting flying.  On cross-examination, when Slotnick asked whether, before the shooting, someone said, 'Look at those four punks bothering that man?', the prosecution objected on the ground of hearsay and a heated discussion between attorneys ensued at the bench.  After Judge Crane overruled the objection, Reid conceded that he had heard the statement made about the four trouble-making "punks" before Goetz drew his gun.  (Later, when Garth's wife, Andrea Reid, testified, it was revealed that the comment about the four "punks" came from her.)  Mary Gant, an actress and the next eyewitness, told jurors that she never saw Canty "make any kind of menacing gesture" or raise his voice.  On cross, however, Gant conceded that the behavior of the youths made her anxious: "I was concerned.  I was afraid."  Another eyewitness, Josephine Holt, also aided the defense by admitting on cross-examination that she had described, in her grand jury testimony, the youths as "standing around the white man" and acting in a loud, harassing, and menacing manner.

Many trial observers believed that the prosecution's star eyewitness was Christopher Boucher, the one witness who testified that he saw Goetz shoot Darrell Cabey as he sat helplessly in a seat by the conductor's cab.  The testimony was damning:



The prosecution followed up Boucher's dramatic testimony with a showing of the videotape of the interview of Goetz by New York City police officers in Concord.  With the lights dimmed, jurors watched the tense confrontation between suspect and detectives on a 27-inch Sony monitor set in front of the jury box.  Goetz bristled with hostility toward Detective Susan Braver, complaining about her voice, the way she framed questions, her attitude, and the city that employed her.  At one point in his confession, Goetz lectured Braver: "Do you know how sick your legal system makes me Miss?...New York city is a system that knows so much and is so good you decide what you decide what is right and wrong....This city doesn’t care about lawlessness.  You talk about anarchy that’s what there is now....What I did down there was, let’s say it’s wrong, that doesn’t bother me, but what this did is it showed the system as being a sham."  In the video Goetz compared his actions on the subway to that of a trapped rat:  "What you have here is nothing more than a vicious rat.  That’s all it is is.  It’s not Clint Eastwood."  Mark Lesly, one of the Goetz trial jurors, later wrote that the videotaped confession provided "our only glimpse of the dangerous nature of Goetz's wrath."  Otherwise, Lesly said, jurors could never have imagined "the meek-looking, mild-mannered individual sitting across from us in the courtroom had been capable of committing the violent acts that he did." 

District Attorney Waples probably should have ended the state's case with the videotape.  Instead, James Ramseur was recalled to the stand--and ended up causing serious damage to the prosecution case.  After offering his version of events in his direct testimony, Ramseur blew up under the relentless and hard-hitting cross-examination of Barry Slotnick, who seemed much more interested in Ramseur's criminal past than anything that happened on the subway.  Slotnick also suggested through his questions that Ramseur was shaping his testimony to help convict Goetz in the hopes that a conviction would improve prospects for the civil suit he and others had filed against Goetz.  Ramseur discounted this idea (presciently), "He’s gonna be found not guilty anyway. I know what time it is."  As questions continued, the exchanges became more and more heated, with Ramseur accusing Slotnick of "twisting" his words and arguing that certain questions were "none of your business."  Eventually, Ramseur pleaded "Take me out of here!" and refused even the direct order of Judge Crane to answer a question ("I refuse.").  He was held in contempt and his testimony stricken from the record.  At Ramseur's sentencing for contempt, Judge Crane admonished him for behavior which, he said, "conveyed viciousness and selfishness more eloquently than words could."  Slotnick, the judge said, "owes you a vote of thanks."