Five Bullets: The Story of Bernie Goetz, New York’s Explosive ’80s, and the Subway Vigilante Trial That Divided the Nation

CNN legal analyst Williams debuts with a thorough reassessment of the 1984 subway vigilante shooting, when white 37-year-old Bernhard Goetz shot four Black teenagers on a New York City subway after one of the victims asked him for $5. Goetz, who claimed he feared being mugged, subsequently received an outpouring of popular support for having “struck back against the forces of decay” that plagued the city. The author explores troublesome aspects of both shooter and victims, from Goetz’s overt bigotry to some of the victims’ later incarceration for violent crimes. Following the case through its criminal and civil trials, Williams explains the often convoluted decisions, like the judge’s banning of “open discussion” of race in the criminal trial—which didn’t stop the defense from presenting “menacing” photos of the victims. He also tracks the prosecution’s missteps—one prosecutor suggested that Goetz “pack his bags and go somewhere else”—and the judge’s shocking permissiveness, seen most bizarrely in a live reenactment with four Black members of the Guardian Angels playing the victims at “their most blatantly thuggish.” Both serve, in part, to explain how the jury acquitted Goetz. Williams explores how the central legal argument of the case—the “reasonableness” of Goetz’s fear—still resonates today. It amounts to a sharp look at a touchstone moment in American conceptions of race, self-defense, and who “has a right to feel safe.” (Feb.)