Goetz Gets New Lawyers; One Was Mugged Twice

Confessed subway vigilante Bernhard Hugo Goetz replaced his lawyer today with two other attorneys, including one who has been mugged twice.

The new lawyers, Joseph Kelner and Barry Slotnick, said they will defend Goetz for free.

The change in defense lawyers came two days before Goetz is scheduled to be arraigned on charges that he shot and seriously wounded four teen-agers who asked him for $5 on a downtown subway train Dec. 22.

Frank Brenner, Goetz’s former lawyer, said he resigned because of differences with his client over how to handle the case, but added that he had “come to like him as a person and increasingly to sympathize with him in his present ordeal.”

Allan Horwitz, a friend of Goetz, said the confessed gunman told him that he switched lawyers because Kelner, the chief counsel on the case, had been mugged twice and could better understand his feelings.

“Bernie feels Joe Kelner would understand what he’s been going through since his first mugging,” Horwitz said. Goetz was beaten during a mugging in 1981.

Kelner said he was mugged by two men last year in the men’s room of his law office. The muggers took his money and beat him unconscious, he said. Kelner was also mugged at gunpoint in the driveway of his home on Long Island.

Slotnick is a criminal lawyer who has defended Mafia suspects in the past. He said he would argue that Goetz acted in self-defense.