Colin Ferguson

On the evening of December 7, 1993, a rush-hour train ride from New York City to Long Island erupted in violence. Without provocation or apparent motive, a black man suddenly began shooting his semiautomatic pistol at white and Asian passengers as he walked up and down the aisle on the crowded train. Three passengers subdued the man as he paused to reload his weapon. Six people were killed, and over 20 others were wounded. Colin Ferguson, a 36-year-old man, was held in the shooting. When it was over, he simply said, “I've done a bad thing.”

Ferguson, a native of Kingston, Jamaica, was a single, unemployed man living in Brooklyn, New York at the time of the murders. After his arrest, police found notes in his pockets expressing his hatred of whites and Asians and the abuse of African Americans by American institutions. Police noted that the seemingly random shooting of the passengers, all either white or Asian, may not have been random after all.

Colin Ferguson boarded a train in New York in December, 1993 and committed mass murder. Ferguson, 37, killed six commuters and wounded 19 during a three-minute rampage on a Long Island Rail Road train.

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Ferguson was charged with six murders and 19 attempted murders. His trial began in 1994 and became front-page news, not so much because of the legal proceedings themselves, but because of the antics of Ferguson, his attorneys, and Nation of Islam leaders. Ferguson fired one attorney, and the court appointed the well-known radical attorneys William Kunstler and Ronald Kuby. Kunstler and Kuby planned to use the notes found in Ferguson's pockets to present an insanity defense based on “black rage.” Defense psychiatric experts agreed that Ferguson was delusional and had major psychiatric problems. [Page 180]Ferguson fired his attorneys because they claimed that he was insane at the time of the crime, and requested that he be allowed to represent himself. After consideration by the judge, Ferguson was allowed to defend himself, with the condition that he accept an attorney to advise him during trial.

The trial became even more absurd when Ferguson cross-examined the victims of the shootings, ranting at the court and at witnesses. The trial continued to its circus-like end, and the jury found Ferguson guilty of all charges. On March 23, 1995, the judge sentenced Ferguson to 315 2/3 years in prison.

That should have been the end of the case, but the antics of Ferguson and his attorneys continued. In February 1998, attorneys argued before an appeals court that a number of errors had occurred, one of them being that Ferguson had not been allowed to ask potential jurors about their attitudes toward African Americans and how they would feel seeing crime scene photos in which only people of their own race were injured. The appellate court upheld the conviction, and Colin Ferguson is serving his sentence in a prison in upstate New York.