New Yorkers riding the city’s dirty, noisy and unreliable subway system try to avoid trouble if they can help it.
With passengers sometimes thrown onto the tracks, stabbed or even shot, the risks of intervening to address threatening or violent behavior are well known.
It is much better to change cars or even take another train, especially given the notorious unpredictability of the usual troublemakers: mentally ill and usually drug-addicted homeless people.
And discretion has always proven to be the better part of courage in such situations, until one day in May last year, when a passenger named Daniel Penny decided he wasn’t going to ignore an erratic homeless man who was threatening him and others he met. They were traveling on a F. train line.
Penny, a well-built architecture student and former US Marine who was 24 years old at the time, grabbed Jordan Neely from behind and threw him to the ground.
While a black passenger helped subdue the struggling Neely by holding his arms, Penny held him in a chokehold with her arms around his neck. While waiting for police, he remained in control for six minutes, a fatal decision, prosecutors said. Thirty-year-old Neely was pronounced dead upon arrival at the hospital.
Yesterday, 19 months after the fatal encounter, Penny, who faced up to 15 years in prison, sensationally walked free. He was unanimously acquitted by a jury of the charge of criminally negligent homicide. A more serious charge of involuntary manslaughter was dismissed Friday because jurors could not agree on a verdict.
Penny’s trial fiercely polarized Americans, and there were scenes of fighting outside the Manhattan courthouse yesterday as crowds protested the not guilty verdict. For many, what mattered was that Neely was black while Penny was white, a distinction that helped the case quickly become a cause célèbre.
Penny’s trial fiercely polarized Americans, and there were scenes of fighting outside the Manhattan courthouse yesterday as crowds protested the not guilty verdict.
Daniel Penny is seen choking Jordan Neely in a viral video. He grabbed Jordan from behind and threw him to the ground. While waiting for the police, he held off for six minutes: a fatal decision.
A video, recorded by a fellow passenger, captured several minutes of the strangulation and its aftermath. It went viral, raising tensions. “They’re going to charge you with murder,” a passenger can be heard telling Penny. “You have to let it go.” Neely can be seen finally going limp.
Prosecutors never directly accused Penny of acting out of racial animus (although they hinted at it at her trial). But he faced accusations from many others, which he vehemently denied, that he was a white supremacist.
Left-wing politicians called it a “lynching” carried out by a dangerous vigilante, while lawyers for Neely’s family argued that, being a trained soldier, Penny knew how to restrain someone without killing them and therefore She should be charged with murder.
Even some who weren’t quick to condemn Penny as a racist chastised him for not showing enough “empathy” toward the homeless (most of whom in New York are black).
Hundreds of mourners, including prominent Democrats and civil rights leaders, attended Neely’s funeral, where the Reverend Al Sharpton told them: ‘Jordan was not bothering anyone on the train. Jordan was screaming for help.
He continued: “When they strangled Jordan, they put their arms around us all.” He did not say who he meant by “they.”
Neely’s family admitted he had his “demons” but said he never physically attacked anyone. Protesters, outraged that Penny was not arrested instantly, even jumped onto the subway tracks to express their displeasure.
New York’s Democratic governor, Kathy Hochul, weighed in, stating that it was “very clear” that Neely was not going to hurt anyone. However, many others supported Penny, and an online legal appeal to pay for her defense attracted more than $2 million in donations in just two days. Some supporters, such as Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, dubbed Penny a “good Samaritan.”
Yesterday, 19 months after the fatal encounter, Penny, who faced up to 15 years in prison, sensationally walked free.
Jordan’s father, Andre Zachary, during a press conference after Penny was found not guilty of fatally strangling his son.
Overnight, Penny became a hero to those who saw her case as the embodiment of everything that went wrong in a “progressive” justice system that allows criminals to remain free and forces respectful citizens to the law to take control of your safety into your own hands.
According to their critics, left-wing prosecutors allowed too many dangerous criminals – including the mentally ill – to go free in an attempt to keep prison numbers down and avoid discriminating against impoverished ethnic minorities by imposing cash bail.
And it is the mentally ill who have been left to fend for themselves on the streets and subways following America’s decision in the 1970s to institutionalize only the most desperate cases.
The tragic result of all this, say Penny’s supporters, is that a public-spirited citizen felt compelled to confront one of the deranged homeless people who have made the New York subway their haunt.
Some of Penny’s critics compared her behavior to that of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, who in May 2020 fatally knelt on George Floyd’s neck, sparking Black Lives Matter protests.
Neely, who had a long history of paranoid schizophrenia and drug abuse, had more than 40 previous arrests, including for a series of brutal assaults on elderly people. In 2015, he was arrested for trying to kidnap a seven-year-old girl whom he was seen dragging down a street.
Jordan in Times Square, New York, before going to see the Michael Jackson movie This Is It in 2009
The trial heard that Neely was such a notorious troublemaker that he was on an unofficial top 50 list compiled by New York officials of the city’s most seriously mentally ill people.
One of Penny’s attorneys described Neely as a “deranged lunatic.” Relatives said her mental health problems had begun 15 years earlier, when her mother was strangled by her boyfriend and her body was dumped in a suitcase.
At Penny’s month-long trial, witnesses described how on May 1, 2023, Neely boarded a train and began screaming, throwing his jacket to the ground and striding across the car.
Neely, who sometimes tried to earn tips as a Michael Jackson impersonator by moonwalking through the train cars, shouted that he was hungry, that he wanted to go back to jail, and that he didn’t care if he lived or died because he was ready to ‘kill.’ “A son of a bitch,” Manhattan Criminal Court heard.
Although attorneys for Penny, who never took the stand, insisted that she had restrained Neely because she was concerned the homeless man might hurt other passengers, some said they had been more alarmed by Penny’s chokehold. All but two of the 11 witnesses who testified said they had never had a more terrifying experience on the subway.
Prosecutors never questioned Penny’s motive in initially approaching Neely, and Dafna Yoran, an assistant district attorney, called it “even laudable.”
However, the fact of the matter was that Penny was “reckless” and “went too far,” keeping Neely strangled for too long. The jury was told that as a former Marine, Penny had been trained to use such keys and should have known she risked killing Neely, and that she refused to let go even when others warned her.
A forensic psychiatrist told the court that Neely was hospitalized more than a dozen times for psychotic episodes and for synthetic cannabis abuse. Neely had hallucinated that he had had conversations with the late gangster rapper Tupac Shakur and believed he heard the voice of the devil, the court heard.
However, in her closing statement yesterday, Assistant District Attorney Yoran insisted that “no one had to die” since “much less deadly physical force would have done the job of protecting Mr. Neely’s passengers.” .
Critics accused Yoran and his fellow prosecutors of repeatedly playing the race card: referring to Penny in court as “the white man” and claiming that the defendant “didn’t recognize that Jordan Neely was a person… saw him as a person.” that it was necessary to eliminate it.”
Yoran warned the jurors that their verdict should not be influenced by whether they themselves would be grateful for Penny’s intervention. “You’re not here to decide if you want to ride the train alone with Jordan Neely,” he said. “That’s not what this case is about.”
It appears that the jurors were among the many Americans who disagreed with her.