Self-Defense and Consent: Three Criminal Law Cases

People v. Goetz (1986): Deadly Force and the Reasonableness Standard

The controversial People v. Goetz (1986) involves the defendant, Bernhard Goetz, who shot and injured four young Black men on a subway train in New York City. Four youths—Troy Canty, Darryl Cabey, James Ramseur, and Barry Allen—were riding the subway; two of them had screwdrivers hidden on their persons, later admitting they intended to use these screwdrivers to unscrew coin boxes attached to arcade games. Goetz was also riding the train and carried an unlicensed .38 caliber pistol he had purchased in 1981. Canty approached Goetz, possibly with one of the other young men beside him, and said, "Give me five dollars." There was no use of force, nor was there a display of a weapon. Goetz responded by standing and firing four shots from his unlicensed gun, which he had been carrying in the waistband of his pants. A bullet struck each of the young men, and then Goetz fired another shot at Cabey, permanently damaging his spinal cord. Goetz fled the scene and ultimately surrendered to police in New Hampshire a week later. Much of the controversy surrounding the case revolves around whether a person has the right to use deadly force based on a belief that they face clear and present danger of severe bodily harm.

New York tried Goetz for attempted murder and assault. The jury acquitted him of both charges, stating that Goetz "was justified in shooting the four men with the silver-plated .38-caliber revolver he purchased in Florida." The jury did convict him of illegal possession of a firearm, for which the court sentenced Goetz to one year in jail. Following sentencing, Goetz told the court: "This case is really more about the deterioration of society than it is about me… I believe society needs to be protected from criminals."

Criminal law professor George Fletcher followed the trial closely. After the acquittal, he commented: "The facts of the Goetz case were relatively clear, but the primary fight was over the moral interpretation of the facts… I am not in the slightest bit convinced that the four young men were about to mug Goetz. If he had said, 'Listen buddy, I wish I had $5, but I don't,' and walked to the other side of the car, the chances are 60–40 nothing would have happened. Street-wise kids like that are more attuned to the costs of their behavior than Goetz was" (qtd. in Roberts 1989).

Professor Fletcher made an astute and correct observation: Goetz was not justified in shooting, as a simple "sorry, I don't have five dollars" would have readily defused the situation. It is more likely that this case reflects the racism embedded in society and the justice system as it existed in the 1980s. Goetz was clearly traumatized and on edge from the time he was mugged in 1981—the incident that prompted him to purchase the gun in the first place. Goetz was not behaving reasonably: any reasonable person would have exhausted verbal options before resorting to a firearm. As Professor Fletcher suggested, the men likely had no intention of mugging Goetz; had he simply dismissed their request and moved to the other end of the car, they would most likely have left him alone. The case raised enduring questions about race, fear, and the limits of self-defense doctrine in American criminal law.

New York Statutes on Deadly Force and the Justification Defense

According to the New York statutes cited in the opinion, the justification statute required an objective element: deadly physical force is permissible only when a reasonable person would believe that he or she is in imminent danger of injury or death. As worded, the statute is reasonable.

However, it would benefit from additional specificity—in particular, a requirement that there be clear evidence of imminent danger, such as someone brandishing a weapon or engaging in threatening body language. Since this case, jurors have also been instructed to consider a defendant's background and to reflect on whether a reasonable person in that same situation would feel endangered. This instruction accounts for the differences in people's backgrounds and how those differences can affect one's perception of danger.

Goetz's shots were clearly fear-driven and largely unnecessary for self-protection. Had the victims been white, it is likely that he would have faced a more straightforward prosecution for attempted murder and assault, underscoring the racial dimensions of how the reasonableness standard in self-defense cases has historically been applied.

State v. Stewart (1988): Battered Woman Syndrome and Imminent Danger

State v. Stewart (1988) is a case in which a woman, Peggy Stewart, was tried for shooting and killing her sleeping husband. Her legal team claimed her actions constituted self-defense—an argument that may have seemed implausible at first glance. However, Stewart's attorneys went to great lengths to establish that she was the victim of long-term abuse. On the morning of the day she shot her husband, Stewart found a loaded .357 magnum in their home. Beyond the fear this discovery caused, Stewart testified that "her husband often made remarks about how she shouldn't bother cleaning the house because she wouldn't be there for long." That evening, after enduring physical and sexual abuse, Stewart considered the possibility of suicide (Wiley).

These details establish a long-standing and recent history of both physical and sexual abuse, as well as repeated threats. While the facts demonstrate that Stewart was in very real and serious danger, the court majority argued that they did not establish imminent danger at the specific moment she fired the weapon. Because her husband was asleep, Stewart had other options available to her: she could have fled the house, left the area, or contacted the police. Her husband was not actively threatening her at that moment, and the majority held that she had not exhausted reasonable alternatives before resorting to lethal force.

The dissent's arguments for imminent danger, by contrast, centered on the history of abuse. Stewart had been victimized for so long that she suffered from a form of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder—something her attorney attempted to introduce through the framework of Battered Woman Syndrome (BWS). Under this framework, the danger Stewart faced could be considered imminent precisely because the severe psychological damage she had sustained was what kept her trapped in the marriage. She was psychologically unable to leave, call the police, or pursue any other reasonable means of protecting herself, and it was this incapacity—directly caused by her abuser—that led to her actions.

State v. Shelley (1997): Consent and Sporting Conduct

In State v. Shelley (1997), the court held that participants in a sporting event may consent to conduct that would otherwise constitute a crime, provided that conduct is reasonably foreseeable and flows directly from the rules of the game. For example, it is reasonable to assume that agreeing to a boxing match implies consent to being struck in the face or sustaining comparable injuries.

Participants should be permitted to consent to such conduct because the nature of the activity makes those acts foreseeable. A person who joins a contact football game understands that there is a real possibility of being knocked down hard enough to suffer a concussion—the rules and physicality of the sport make such outcomes possible, and players implicitly consent to that risk. However, that same football player cannot consent to being choked by an opponent, since choking is not a foreseeable outcome within the rules of the game. Consent, therefore, cannot extend to acts that fall outside those boundaries.

The question of whether individuals should be allowed to knowingly and voluntarily consent to the commission of crimes against themselves is nuanced. Many professions—beyond professional sports—require individuals to place themselves in harm's way and accept risks that would constitute assault in other contexts. Combat or stage fighting in theatre and film, for instance, attempts to remove as much danger as possible, yet actors accept that a fellow performer might miss their mark and make real contact. Society cannot eliminate these art forms out of a generalized fear of harm. Free individuals retain the right to place themselves in harm's way within reasonable limits.

Shelley was not permitted the defense of consent because no basketball player could ever reasonably consent to the type of injury inflicted in this case. Within the ordinary rules of basketball, sustaining a broken jaw is not within the remotest realm of possibility—it is analogous to a volleyball player being punched in the face by an opponent. The injury was entirely outside the foreseeable risks of the sport, and therefore consent to it could not be implied by participation in the game.

Conclusion

For the reasons stated above, the court's decision in Shelley is entirely correct. Shelley's act of injuring his opponent's jaw was by no means a foreseeable event within the rules of basketball. Injuries such as a sprained ankle, a dislocated knee, a strained shoulder, or even a bruised rib are all within the realm of possibility in a basketball game. A broken jaw, however, is not something a player can give consent to—regardless of the fact that the game was informal and unofficiated. Taken together, the three cases analyzed here illustrate that the doctrines of self-defense and consent in criminal law depend heavily on the standards of reasonableness and foreseeability, and that those standards must be applied carefully to account for the full context of each situation.

Works Cited

People v. Goetz, 68 N.Y.2d 96. 1986. Print.

State v. Shelley. 929 P.2d 489 Wash. App. 1997. Print.

State v. Stewart. Supreme Court of Kansas. 21 Oct. 1988. Print.

Wiley, Krista. "Getting Away With Murder." Psychology Today, 12 Feb. 2013, www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-superhuman-mind/201302/getting-away-murder. Accessed 7 Oct. 2017.