The Trial and Legal Defense

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Ronald Reagan is president MTV is just three years old, and it's the era of the Death Wish movies This is the story of a man who decided to clean up the most violent town in the world. I s to the real Morning. If you've never seen the Death Wish movies, they follow the actor Charles Bronson as he goes on a shooting spree to depending on the movie, avenge the murder of his wife or the murders of other ordinary New Yorkers who fall prey to the city's wildest, most violent criminals. plot sort of doesn't matter in a weird way This is historian Heather Anne Thompson, author of the new book, Fear and Fury matters is that the audience is relating to this feeling of always unsettled when you leave your apartment or your home and that at any given moment some young black or brown thug will cause you harm The eighties were full of movies like this, Death Wish, the Exterminator, The Dirty Harry movies This is kind of a glorified vigilante genre of media. Every man for himself, make sure you're armed. takeake out any would be assailant on your own. Make sure that you're protecting your family. and that every man for himself message resonated with people All the movies came out in what was actually a very difficult moment in cities like New York. This is four years into the Reagan Revolution, cities have been stripped of a lot of their social resources and trash is piling up on the city streets. muggs are up, the drug trade is up. The city is feeling dangerous. There's mainly a sense that nobody is doing anything about any of this there's a real lack of understanding of why A cities feeling so under siege Then in nineteen eighty four, something tragic happens in New York City A white man named Bernie Getz fed up with the crime and violence of the city boards the subway and shoots four black teenagers None of them have weapons But as the story spreads and becomes a headline in papers across the city, it starts transforming into a fantasy pulled right out of Death wish compleplete with dangerous armed criminals. They're not always necessarily going to have the gun, right? But they're going to have something they're going to slash you with jagged glass or they're going to whip out a tire iron. And in the Bernie Getz case, there's sort of a new version of this, which is that young teenagers in the city are carrying screwdrivers. notot just screwdrivers. sharpened screwdrivers, as in the normal tool transformed into a piercing deadly weapon O It was completely made up The teens were not carrying sharpened screwdrivers or any other kind of weapons. That was the invention of this one moment in nineteen eighty four A sneaky new weapon powerful symbol ninety nine percent inv visible and BBC studios This is a history of the United States in a hundred objects I'm Roman Mars Today, how the mythical, sharpened screwdriver at the heart of the Bernie Get shooting surfaced a new era of misinformation and why it's still invoked as a justification for white vigilante violence today Before the four teenagers in the Gs case became known as sharpened screwdriver wielding criminals, they were just four kids in the South Bronx If New York was in bad shape The South Bronx was in catastrophic shape This is Elliot Williams, legal analyst and author of a book on gets called Five Bullets The mid nineteen eightays were a quite significant period of transition Certainly, just about everything withdrew as the city tightened its belt Firemen, police, sanitation workers gone. Public schools were decimated, and stuck in the middle of that. were four young men Barry Allen, Darryl Kabe Cy Candy and James Ramur They were all between eighteen and nineteen years old and lived in a subsidized housing project called Claremont Village in the Bronx. Like Bernie, the four teenagers were soon to become famous But we still actually don't know much about their lives I tried to speak to all of the surviving young men Two of the four are surviving. I tried very hard to speak to them. I got as close as speaking to two of Darryl Kaby's sisters for the book, but they did not want to be on the record or quoted in the book and I respected that Still, there are some small details we do know We know they had siblings. We know James Remsur was a talented breakdancer We know that Barry Allen was a young father. We know Dal Caby ultimately is raised for most of his childhood by only his mother because his father, who hadd been working as a taxi driver, had been crushed by his own cab in a carjacking. And his mother very much wanted more for him, wanted him to get away from all of the pressures and troubles of the South Bronx to sort of find a better life But at this point in nineteen eighty four None of them had been able to get away. So these are four kids who are hanging around essentially day after day h and have no money. No jobs No prospects, but who still, of course, want to go on a date, want to play a video game, want to be a teenager And so they decide on december twenty second, nineteen eighty four that they're going to go into the city and they're going to go to a video arcade because video arcades had machines that you could take a screwdriver, jimmy open the receptacle, and you could get some quarters out of it And in nineteen eighty four, if you got a bunch of quarters, that was the difference. between you being able to get something to eat between you being able to imagine maybe taking your girlfriend to the movies, that was the difference between having a life and not having a life But I will note was not that they were the sort of street gang who were out marauding or wilding or whatever else. This was a common act that teenagers did I mean, this was the golden age of arcade games. Pacman Donkey Kong, these games were everywhere you're talking liquor stores, Bodegas, bowling alleys. It was painfully easy for someone with a long screwdriver and a little ingenuity to just pop it open and run away with all of that money in it. And in many respects was cleaner or safer than mugging or robbing someone. It wasn't that police were likely to move heaven and earth to try to track down a kid with eighty dollars of quarters in his pocket. And even if you got caught, you wouldn't go to jail for a long time. So three days before Christmas nineteen eighty four, when the city is bustling and people are scrambling to get last minute gifts, the four teenagers get on a train to go to an arcade downtown got on, they jumped the turnstile in the South Bronx. They were goofing off. They were certainly doing pull ups bars, walking around, asking people for cigarettes or for matches or whatever else Meanwhile, Birdie gets in Manhattan, about thirty minutes south of the Bronx on the train is about to leave his apartment He's had a frustrating morning and he decides that he's gonna get on a train and he's gonna go down and potentially see some friends, maybe have a drink or two, but whatever, get out of the apartment And so he leaves mid afternoon to walk very nearby to the fourteenth Street station gets on the two train going downtown and onto this one car, there are these four teenagers. having a really good time. They are joking around, they're laughing in the day, subways had these straps that hung down and they were know swinging on those draps and goofing around and talking to people, Hey, what's up? You got a light And so Bernie get sits down and decides to sit right across from them U which, you know, is noteworthy to the teens because of course, you know, nobody wants to sit next to teenagers The train wasn't full, so Berngetes didn't have to sit next to the teenagers but he did. And one of them who is really closest to him named Chherry Kanty is sort of interested in this And he says, Hey, you know, he greets him and Bernie gets kind of gruffly, you know, so you know, hey responds back. And he's kind of encouraged, and he's encouraged in particular to ask this guy, does he have five dollars So that was not a particularly weird thing for Troy Candy to say, hey, have you got five bucks This is the eighties and panhandling is the name of the game. You can't go anywhere in New York City in nineteen eighty four without somebody saying, Hey, you got a dollar, you got five bucks. But Bernie doesn't like that Bernie get stands up He slowly turns and in that moment, Trey Hanty sort of thinks, wow, this guy's actually going to give me five bucks. Cool. But what happens is Bernie get stands up, reaches into the waistband of his slacks And what he has there is a hidden holster What Troy didn't know was that Bernie Getz routinely carried guns And in New York, that was illegal to just carry a gun because you wanted to. So he'd actually purchased his guns illegally because he'd gone down to Florida and purchased them and brought them back So Bernie has one of those illegal guns on him thirty eight Sith and Wesson And now he pulls it out on the train swings around, assumes a combat position, and shoots Ti Canty front on straight in the chest and immediately right behind is his friend Barry Allen, who's not said a word to Braing Gs horrified tries to get away, tries to run And Mernegetz shoots him in the back And then their friend James Ramzor, who's even further down the train, who's also said nothing to Bernieetets. he shoots him As he's trying to get away in the arm, it goes through his side and ultimately into his lungs. Now three of the fourteens are on the floor of the train bleeding Troy Canty from a bullet to the chest Barry Allen from a bullet to the back, James Rim Store from a bullet to his arm ins side Bernie also fires at the fourth team, Darl Cabe and Missses shaking Kie sits down in the rear of the car head down and grips the edge of a seat, hoping that Bernie will just move on And when Bernie Gets walks over to this fourth teenager, Daryryl KB He looks down at him and he says, you look okay. Here's another. And that's when he puts a gun straight in his side. pulls the trigger thus severing his spinal cord and rendering him paralyzed for the rest of his life While this is all happening, the conductor pulls the emergency brake and the train comes to a halt So the train is stopped on the tracks in the darkness between somewhere between fourteenth Street and Chambber Street in lower Mhattan at that moment gets appeared calm to passengers and it appeared almost poised But he ultimately, knowing that the train would be swarmed with police in a matter of moments, just fled jumped off the train, ran through the subway platform with his gun took a cab home rented a car and fled to New Hampshire The boys are hoisted out of the train and rushed to the hospital All four were badly wounded Kabbe is the worst off In a coma with a bullet in his spinal cord He and Barry Allen are hurried into the operating room And meanwhile, back on the train, the police are trying to make sense of what in the world just happened And so what are they left with? They're left with the clothing of the boys who have been stripped so that they can be attended to medically. The police discover that in the pockets of two of these young men, in particular, it was Darryl Cabie and James Ramsur that they have crew drivers initially when they pull these screwdrivers out and they note them, they catalog them. There'd been no reason to think they'd ever been taken out. They were secured in their jackets And that was kind of the end of it The police log the screwdrivers, but they don't think of them as relevant yet Meanwhile, the whole system begins to mobilize to figure out what the boys could have done to justify the shooting. passasting about comombing the records to figure out what in the world record must these teenagers have? becausecause surely They must be criminals. Surely, they must be responsible for the fact that they themselves now have bullet holes in them realize that these teenagers have racked up a series of misdemeanor citations over the previous years They'd been caught jumping the turnstle to avoid paying the subway fare and trying to steal quarters from an arcade All the citations were minor. If it weren't for the Gs case, none of those charges would ever bring them to court. But within a very short period of time, two Bronx judges make the executive decision that they're going to suddenly issue a blizzard of warrants for these teenagers arrest. Meanwhile, the police are looking for Bernie so they can question him too The search goes on today for the so called subway vigilanti But already, the public isn't even sure the police should be doing that. Police reported receiving more than five hundred calls, praising the man who shot the teenagers. Bernie Getz is celebrated by ordinary people. They champion him. They decide that he's innocent even before they know his name. They are furious that the DA's office will even consider prosecuting him Before Bernard Getz was identified, the New York Post started calling him the quote Deathwish vigilante. That's the nickname They gave him, and they started running graphics about the Deathwish Vigilante after Charles Bronson the protagonist of the movie Death Wish So long before Bernie Getz had pulled that trigger, they were already really being primed with this rhetoric to identify with Bernie Getz. Bernie Getz, he's just minding his own business. He's a hard working guy. He's a small business owner Freddie was a regular guy. You know what I mean? He's a regular guy. He's no big thing about him, you know And he gets on that train and four black thugs are gonna try to harm him. And so that's all they need to know, right? Gs did the people of the city of New York, a great neighor. If it was me, I would have killed the gu. I mean, if it was me and I had to defend myself, I would have done exactly the same thing. I think he did right. They tried to mug him You like kids and monsters. But There's one detail in this story, one piece of misinformation that really started to stand out, and it had to do with those screwdrivers Police say the teenagers had arrest records and three were carrying long screwdrivers. Police say the boys were armed with sharpened screwdrivers. Now the media was reporting that even though the boys didn't have guns, they had weapons in the form of screwdrivers and not just screwdrivers Sharpened ones These were not sharpened screwdrivers These were regular screwdrivers that they needed to jimmy open the coin receptacles at The local arcade And it's not just the use of the Sarbon screwdrivers, but the use of the term armed. the narrative that The four young men were armed with screwdrivers is itself a fiction There was never any screwdriver shown to brandished or made available to Bernard Getz at any time. It is simply not true But that didn't matter After the New York Daily News reported it, its taboid competitor, the New York Post, doubled down Every major paper ran with this notion that the screwdrivers were sharpened. Police say they did find several sharpened screwdrivers in the coat pockets of the victim. According to police, carriot sharpened heavy duty screwdrivers And each time another new story mentioned it, it became more and more real Four black teenagers wielding sharpened screwdrivers pressed him for five dollars. Eventually, even major mainstream publications like The New York Times and Time Magazine ran with this detail. All you knew was a white guy that had shot for black teenagers who were armed with sharpened screwdrivers. and that stuck and it taps into a long running narrative in the United States over lifting up vigilantes and vigilante behavior Even as these news stories are circulating, there's a big piece of the puzzle missing Bernie, who had been on the lamb for nine days, still needed to be questioned, and he was about to finally emerge and give his own version of events Say you've always wanted to have a backyard oasis. Here's the thing. 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And listeners of this show will get a seventy five dollars sponsored job credit to help get your job the premium status it deserves and indeed dot com slash podcast Terms and conditions applly Hiring, do it the right way withith indeed After nine days of traipsing around the snowy backroads of Vermont and New Hampshire, Bernie Getz finally decides to turn himself in He walks into the police station in Conquered New Hampshire and starts talking I mter Gifft, this is all on videootape. Sure. Nothing that said in this room is off the video tape. It is for your protection and for our. turns himself in, he voluntarily waives his right to a lawyer And he proceeds to give a two hour videotaped confession In that, he pulls no punches I wanted to kill those guys. I wanted to name those guys. I wanted to make them sucker in every way I could. If I had more bullets, I would have shot them all again and again My problem was I ran out of bullets and I was going to gouge one of the guy's eyes out with my keys afterwards He makes clear that robbery had nothing to do with it Look, they don't have weapons. And he says this a few times even when the DA, you know, clearly mystified as to why he would have done it was almost like people are throwing him a lifeline. Well, you know, is it because you were mugged, you know, you know, few years earlier. He says, No, it had nothing to do with that. you know, Were you being robbed? And he says no. He even admits to going up to Daryrel Caby, who was cowering in his seat and saying a line It shocks me every time I hear it. When I saw this one fellow I saw the gleam in his eye and the smile on his face. I went to him the second time But I looked at him And I said, you seem to be doing all right. Here's another Bernie was fed up The city boys, and he decided to take matters into his own hands He had admitted to all of it My question now was W that matter More than two years after the shooting, the case finally went to court Bernie faced a thirteen count indictment And on paper, it looked like a slam dunk for prosecutors On the one hand, you have a prosecutor who has everything on his side. He's got Bernie Gz's confession. he's got very badly injured victims. You know, the facts are on his side Bernie Kess is already winning in the court of public opinion. and he has hired a very, very important lawyer by the name of Barry Slotnik who was going to in effect, bamboozle The jury Ver slotnik. n't have been more out of central casting. When you think of kind of Blitzy showbiz type attorney. Barry Slotnik was it. He had tailored Italian suits. He had jewelry, the tie tack. He had a alligator skin briefcase in each hand. He's chauffeurred in a Cadillac. he smoked cigarettes. He had represented many high profile members, I believe that the Colombo Cime family Tee was a mob lawyer So on one side, you have this shiny mob lawyer representing Bernie Getz. and on the other, there's the prosecutor tasked with proving the boys were the victims And the jury is waiting to hear from both sides. you know, when you describe this, you know the contours of the case to anyone, they have a hard time coming up with what the defense is going to be. but could you boil it down for me? What was the sort of nature of the defense's case The defense's case was multifold. I think the big Part of it is and Barry Slotnik says this in his opening statement I am going to put these young men on trial. And frankly, I't he called them young men. it was thugs and hoodloms and savages and whatever else. And he framed it as a gang, a street gang that sought to terrorize if not Bernard getz, whoever was the next unlucky victim of their vicious path. The judge banned explicit talk of race at the trial But race was always front of mind They never said black They never said it, but they used language of savages, thugs, animals, monsters, hoodlums The defense was not shy about doing everything they possibly could. stoke the racial biases of the jurk. And it wasn't just the language he used. One of the first things Slotnik and his team did was deliberately seek out photographs where the young men looked their most menacing. giant twenty four by thirty six or whatever, black and white posters of these four young men in which the young men just didn't look. friendly you Slotnik even put those pictures on easels in front of the jury. For no reason, remember, these are victims. These were not. Perpetrators critis isn andt evidence put every day when they walked in. these menacing looking photographs of these four young black men would be staring at the jury because they wanted the jury to see who these men were. I draw their own conclusions from that Then about a month into the trial Slotnik pulled out the big guns One morning they went into court and taped out a model of the train car. on the floor of the courtroom Slotnik was staging what was supposed to be a reenactment of the shooting But very quickly, it was clear that almost nothing about it resembled what actually happened. They brought in four of the meanest looking black guys they could find it and dressed them up in dirty jeans and white t shirts and had them represent The four young men So the representation of the boys was already inaccurate They also didn't try to replicate any of the other conditions on the train that day The recreation didn't show any of the other passengers who had been there, and instead of trying to recreate where the boys were actually sitting or standing, the four actors were directed to stand in a semic circle around the stand in for Bernie Getz. Think of all of the various factors that would have been at play, but all it was was a taped out model of the car with four mean looking black teenagers grabbing and tugging and shoving and pulling the model Bernard gets The judge eventually stopped the demonstration When damage was done, the jury saw what the defense wanted them to see, which was four young black men beating up a white man, and that's it. In essence This is how most of the trial goes. The defense continued to use racialized language and stereotypes to amp up the jurors' larger fears and anxieties about the city And to use all of this to prove that Bernie was acting in self defense, that he was reasonable to think that he was about to be robbed or mugged They even explained away his confession. The defense made the decision, a very risky one, but said that this was a frightened man. Even though he's openly confessing he was unambiguous and I intended to murder these men and to make them suffer as possible. Those were his words. But becausecause he was scared and out of his mind, that meant that we should discredit the words that come out of his mouth It's very risk But ultimately, the strategy paid off In june nineteen eighty seven, the jury acquitted Bernie Getz of the most serious charges against him. not guilty of attempted murder not guilty of assaulting the four boys. The only thing he was held accountable for was the possession of illegal firearms. and in the end, he only served eight months What is this real basic legal reasason for the jury, just explain to me why the jury, you know voted not to convict him The legal reason goes back to this question of reasonableness. The law in the state of New York says one can use deadly or lethal force if he reasonably believes. He's about to be a victim of a robbery. And after doing that analysis, the jury felt that Getz was reasonably afraid. and they think that they were simply doing was applying the law saying in a rough environment in a rough city. This individual was reasonable in his belief that a mugging might have been imminent The Getz case actually set a new legal precedent around that question When is it reasonable for someone to act in self defense Before the case, the New York state legislature hadn't clearly defined what reasonable meant. And the question was, is reasonableness subjective in the sense that If you genuinely feel scared in your heart, that's enough. I feel scared, therefore I can use deadly force I'm going to use deadly force and that tracks with how we would assume other people in society would behave. That compares my behavior to everyone else's. And those are two different ways that courts around the country had grappled with how to use the term. This question is so contentious, it actually goes up to the highest court in New York, which decides once and for all, to clarify it Technically, they say you have to consider both things, what the person was afraid of and what an average reasonable person would be afraid of But as we see in the Bernie Getz case, even considering that definition of reasonable, what the average person might do still ultimately comes down to a very subjective opinion This measure of reasonableness seems to have just I don't know. We seem to accept a lot of more of this Yeah. We have no evidence to suggest that a robbery was imminent, but the mere fact that One might have sincerely thought that a mugging was coming would have allowed him to kill them under the law. Like if he'd succeeded and actually committed the act consummated the act of homicide That would have been protected under New York law. and which is just sort of it's one of the realities of the American conception of self defense that we don't ever really stop to think about which might lead to innocent people getting shot preemptively and we as a society sort of make peace with that. So that's the legal reason why it gets gone off Do you have take on what the real reason was, like what do people say It's both my knowledge of the system and cynicism as a former prosecutor. And I would say Honestly, the jury saw themselves in Bernard gets. Another jury could easily have convicted him of attempted murder, starting with the fact that he says on the record to police, knowingly and voluntarily, I intended to murder them. In an attempted murder trial, that's a confession. And so this idea that he was scared and out of his mind means that we should discredit the words that come out of his mouth. to me, that's just ludicrous. That's nonsense. But they saw themselves in him Ten of the twelve jury members were white. half of the jury had actually been victims of crime, some of them on the subway They were primed to see themselves in gets and to see the boys as attackers. And if you believe the papers, attackers wielding sharpened screwdrivers Every single serious source of looked at this has found has debunked the sharpenedrewdriver's theory And again, that to me extends not just to whether they were sharpened The use of the term armed when referring to The teenagers Because number one, we know the purpose for which they had the screwdrivers. and number two, we know that they at no point attempted to even threaten to use them withith respect to Bernard Getz And yet at the end of the day in a narrative very familiar to today that we all inhabit The facts won't matter. because people will want to somehow exonerate him anyway In the same way that the Gets case acted as a kind of stress test for the legal definitions behind self defense, it was also a testing ground for something else In the late seventies, Rupert Murdoch, then an ambitious conservative media mogul, came to the States with the dream of dominating the US market startarting with buying the New York Post And he quickly understands that one of the most important things that you need when you're going to dominate a media market is you need readers And one of the easiest ways to get readers is to kind of keep hitting them with salacious stories that just baffle them and defy imagination. I'll give you just one example of that that just exemplifies this moment so well. A reporter from the New York Post was later interviewed about the reporting in the post in these years And this reporter gave an example of how there'd be an event. and a post reporter would be on the scene and sort of ask the police officer like a crime and say, do you know what happened? You know, who are your suspects? What's going on? And the police officers say, no, we're still investigating it. And the reporter would say, well, you know, have you ruled out this? haveave you ruled out that? And like you know, have you ruled out a homosexual angle And of course, the police officer is like, look, we haven't ruled out anything You know, we're still investigating. And then the headline would be, homosexual angle not ruled out in this crime, right? Bernie Getz's case was really ground zero for this in New York City, and really the nation because Rupert Murdoch's New York Post will become Fox News. and Bernie Getz will become that every man, that resentful, raged filled, every man that over time will be allowed to do whatever he wants even legally as long as he just says he felt threatened In the decades after, we haveve had more people enacting the Death Wish fantasy taking their idea of justice into their own hands In twenty twelve, George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer in Sanford, Florida, saw a black teenager in a dark hoodie walking down the street Zimmerman said he thought the team was casing the area, looking for houses to rob But rather than wait for police, Zimmerman got out of his car and guned down seventeen year old Traayvon Martin Traayvon had no weapons only a bag of skkittles in his pocket In twenty twenty, Kyle Rittenhouse showed up at a Black Lives Matter protest in Konosha, Wisconsin with an AR fifteen style rifle. He said he went to protect local businesses to do what he thought law enforcement could not Riddenhouse shot three people killing two and wounding another the modern day version of this kind of unleashing of rage and violence is perhaps not surprisingly much more extreme How can it be that Kyle Rittenhouse can literally show up at a protest guns in hand and shoot three people. kill people and have people celebrate H How Writtenhouse struck us as bright decent, sincere, dutiful, and hard working exactly the kind of person you'd want many more of in your country Then in twenty twenty three, Daniel Penney, a former Marine, got on the same New York City subway as Jordan Neey, a thirty year old, unarmed black man Neeeee was in the middle of a mental health crisis and he began to shout and act erratically Penny grabbed Nely from behind brought him to the ground. and placed him in a choke hold for several minutes Daniel Penney, like Bernie Getz deems him threatening and killed him And here, just like the other two cases, the same thing happened They all claim self defense And they're all lionized Daniel Pennney was a good Samaran putut his whole life at risk I think he deserves a medal. New York needs this In this support, it doesn't stop with conservative media. It reaches beyond billionaire of businessm. Even the president of the United States Put on your imagination hat and imagine if Daniel Penny is a black man And Jordan Neey is a white man. Daniel Penny kills Jordan Neely in a choke coold Close your eyes and imagine Does Donald Trump invite him to sit in his private box at the Army Navy game weeks later after his acquittal. And I think the answer is no Do Andreresen Horrowitz, the most prestigious venture capital firm on the planet G him a job offer days after his acquittal And I think again, the answer is no In the end, all three men are acquitted of all assault charges justust as Bernie Gs had been In fact, in the Penny case, when the jury asked for clarification on the question of what was reasonable, the judge specifically referred them back to the precedent set in the Gs trial And that's not the only way that Bernie keeps coming up in these visual ante cases He is still very much lionized. He was asked what he thought about Kyle Rittenhouse's verdict. He was asked What he thought about Daniel Pennney's verdict? He's still able to be the hero of his story Bernie Getz is still invoked again and again. Tenagers have sort of disappeared Meanwhile, James Ramzor is dead killed himself one of the anniversaries of this shooting