Good & Bad Samaritans

Why did 38 witnesses ignore Kitty Genovese's screams for help when she was fatally stabbed in the Kew Gardens section of New York City one night last year? At the University of Chicago Law School last week, scholars from four countries gravely pondered such puzzles of public apathy at a symposium on "The Good Samaritan --and the Bad."

Predictably, some blamed the moral numbing of big-city life--its vanishing sense of community, the fear of "getting involved," the idea that crime is only for policemen to handle. Yet, as Virginia Law Professor Charles O. Gregory noted: "Our common law has always refused to transmute moral duties into legal duties." A man who ignores a drowning baby may be "a moral monster," ruled a New Hampshire court in 1897, "but he is not liable in damages for the child's injury, or indictable under the statute for its death."

Sobering Results. U.S. law does oblige some people to help others--for example, parents must help their children, husbands their wives, ship captains their passengers and crew members. But those not legally responsible become legally liable if they volunteer. Indeed, the rescuer who accidentally causes injury may be sued for negligence or even prosecuted for assault; if he is injured himself, he has little recourse. U.S. life abounds with sobering instances. In Chicago in 1961, Negro Cab Driver Lawrence Boyd tried to stop three Negro muggers from robbing two white youths. Boyd was shot twice, paralyzed in one arm, lost his job, and is now $9,000 in debt. In Upper Darby, Pa., last fall, George Senn fired a shotgun in the air to prevent 20 thugs from attacking two girls and a boy outside his window. Senn was convicted of aggravated assault and battery, paid a $500 fine, and now faces a damage suit from his "victims."

By contrast, a Frenchman who fails to help another when he can do so without risk is liable for up to five years in prison and a $3,000 fine. The law's rationale, explained Sorbonne Law Professor Andre Tunc, is that a bystander "participates in the murder by his decision not to intervene." Similar laws are on the books in Britain, Germany, Italy and Russia. Surveys do not show that citizens of those countries feel any more like helping, said Chicago Sociologist Hans Zeisel. But in a comparative study of U.S. and German students, Zeisel found that 75% of the Americans and only 42% of the Germans opposed penalties for Bad Samaritans --those who refuse help when it is obviously needed. Argued Oxford Don Anthony W. Honore: "The law would be a poor thing if it did not in general encourage rescue."

Encouraging Signs. Should U.S. law thus make it a crime to be a Bad Samaritan? At the very least it should compensate rescuers for injuries and lawsuits, argued Chicago Law Professor Norval Morris. Would the country then blossom with Good Samaritans? Perhaps, but as Washington Post Editorialist Alan Barth wryly recalled: "The original Good Samaritan was fortunate in not arriving on the scene until after the thieves had set upon the traveler, robbed him and beaten him half to death. The Samaritan cared for him, but he did not put himself in any peril by doing so."*

Despite his reservations, Barth suggested that Americans have recently "accepted a collective responsibility to be our brothers' keepers to a degree never before manifested." University of Illinois Sociologist Joseph Gusfield was equally optimistic. Mass society may create indifference, he said, but with it come mass communications that spur moral responses. Gusfield's prize example: the recent descent on Selma of Americans from every corner of the country. Gusfield called that phenomenon "one of the greatest outpourings of mass Samaritanism in American history."

*Jesus had an ironic reason for making a "good" Samaritan the hero of his parable: his Jewish listeners could think nothing but bad of the hated Samaritans, a heretical Jewish sect that claimed descent from Joseph and viewed Judeans as apostates. Samaritans then occupied one-third of Palestine, now they consist of only about 600 poverty-stricken people living in two decaying villages in Israel and Jordan.

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