A jury in Manhattan has found Marine Daniel Penny not guilty of the criminally negligent homicide of Jordan Neely, the subway maniac who was threatening fellow straphangers when Penny subdued him with a chokehold.
Today’s welcome verdict was the second count on which Penny prevailed. On Friday, the jury said it was deadlocked on a second-degree manslaughter charge and prosecutors dismissed the charge.
The courtroom audience was pleased. The leader of the city’s extremist Black Lives Matter was not, and threatened vigilante justice against whites.
The Subway Death
Penny’s legal persecution began after Neely, a schizophrenic, threatened passengers on a subway train on May 1, 2023.
Neely was also a career criminal with some 42 arrests. His offenses included disorderly conduct and fare-beating as well as drug crimes. Three years ago, he beat up a 67-year-old woman in the East Village. She suffered a broken nose and fractured orbital bone.
Neely’s threats were increasing, Penny said. He saw women and children nearby, so put Neely in a chokehold. The former Marine did not intend to kill him.
Neely died.
Though passengers testified that Penny likely saved their lives, far-left District Attorney Alvin Bragg, elected with the help of Hungarian communist billionaire George Soros, charged him in Neely’s death.
A motion from Penny’s attorneys to dismiss the case, which the judge denied, cited the grand jury testimony of the straphangers whom Penny saved:
The Grand Jury witnesses told of their fear upon observing Mr. Neely’s conduct. [One] described Neely’s words as “insanely threatening,” delivered with an affect that witness characterized as “sickening” and “satanic.”… [One believed] he “was going to die” as Neely began approaching him…. He described the moment as “absolutely traumatizing,” beyond anything he had ever experienced in six years riding the subway…. [Another witness] was taking her son to his therapy appointment. She recounted Neely saying: “I want to hurt people. I want to go to Rikers. I want to go to prison,” and her unnerved son asking her, “Mommy, why does he want to go to prison.”… Mother and son took cover behind her son’s stroller, shielding themselves from Neely, who was now making “half-lunge movements” and coming within a “half a foot of people”.… [Another witness], a student commuting from her high school, recalled the moment she heard Neely say “someone is going to die today.” She put her hand on her classmate’s … chest and began “praying them [sic] doors would open” so she could leave.… [A] retiree who rode the subway daily during her 30-year career … described her reaction to Neely’s words and demeanor as follows: “I have been riding the subway for many years. I have encountered many things, but nothing that put fear into me like that.”
Besides that, at trial, as the New York Post reported, “the defense’s medical expert, forensic pathologist Dr. Satish Chundru, claimed that Neely died not from Penny’s chokehold, but by ‘the combined effects of sickle cell crisis, the schizophrenia, the struggle and restraint, and the synthetic marijuana.’”
That sounds similar to the death of George Floyd, who died of a fentanyl overdose as police officer Derek Chauvin restrained him.
“I wasn’t trying to injure him. I’m just trying to keep him from hurting anybody else,” Penny told detectives after his arrest. “That’s what we are taught in the Marine Corps.”
Reaction
Some 40 witnesses testified in the case, the Post explained, and when they were done, so was the prosecutors’ persecution: “We the jury have come to a unanimous decision on count two,” the jury foreman said.
While the courtroom audience applauded, Neely’s defenders raged outside
“We need some Black vigilantes,” said anti-white extremist and Black Lives Matter leader Hawk Newsome. “People want to jump up and choke us and kill us for being loud? How about we do the same when they attempt to oppress us?”
Neely wasn’t just “loud” when he said “someone is going to die today” before Penny subdued him.
But that aside, Newsome’s reaction is no surprise. On Friday, after prosecutors dropped the manslaughter charged because the jury was deadlocked, he said that “they picked a white supremacist jury specialist to target the racists in that jury,” the Daily Mail reported:
“The prosecution pointed out the fact that the defense was eliminating people based on race.
“Logically, if you pick a white supremacist jury specialist and you pack a jury with white people obviously you think race has a specific role in this case and obviously you are looking for that one white supremacist hold out. That one hold out.”
He added: “Racism has its tentacles all over this case and all over the minds of white America.”
Newsome added that anyone who thinks Penny to be innocent has “racism in their heart,” before saying “the KKK got another victory.”
So millions of Americans must have “racism in their heart” because they, too, believe Penny did nothing wrong.
Perhaps Penny’s attorney Steven Raiser put it best during his closing statement.
“Who do you want on the next train ride with you?” he asked:
The guy with the earbuds minding his own business who you know would be there for you if something happened? Or perhaps you just hope that someone like Jordan Neely does not enter that train when you are all alone, all alone in a crowd of others frozen with fear?
As the jury deliberated, Neely’s father sued Penny for negligent contact, assault, and battery.
