U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) thinks the real danger on New York City’s subway system isn’t the crazed homicidal maniacs like the late Jordan Neely, who was threatening to kill straphangers before former Marine Daniel Penny stopped him.
Rather, the real danger is men like Penny, who stopped Neely with a chokehold. Neely later died of myriad causes unrelated to the chokehold, an expert witness at Penny’s manslaughter trial said.
A jury found Penny innocent of criminally negligible homicide yesterday, and on Friday deadlocked on a second-degree manslaughter charge.
But AOC, as the former bartender is called, declared Penny guilty of the crimes. Men like Penny, she said, must be stopped.
The Verdict
Penny’s acquittal was no sure thing in New York City, an oasis of far-left kookery. But convicting Penny was even too much for a jury in that benighted real-life imitation of Gotham, where illegal-alien criminals and others terrorize residents only to be routinely freed to terrorize even more.
Neely was one of them. A violent career criminal arrested more than 40 times, Neely was on the subway on May 1 to kill someone. Or so he said, witnesses told a grand jury.
“Someone is going to die today,” he told the terrified commuters. Thus did Penny spring to action. He subdued the violent sociopath with a chokehold and held him until authorities arrived. Neely died.
But a defense expert witness, 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.’”
More than 40 witnesses testified at the trial. One claimed Neely was “satanic.” Others vouched for Penny, whom they believe saved their lives.
On Friday, the jury deadlocked on a second-degree manslaughter charge, and so prosecutors dismissed it. Then, yesterday, the jury declared him not guilty of criminally negligent homicide.
The verdicts sent Black Lives Matter extremist Hank Newsome into a rage. After the manslaughter charge was dismissed, he accused the jurors of being “white supremacists” who gave the Ku Klux Klan “another victory.” After yesterday’s decision, he said the city needs “black vigilantes” to teach the city’s white a lesson.
AOC’s Remarks
Thus comes the congresswoman, the subject of richly-deserved ridicule on social media.
The latest comments comport with other of her more preposterous utterances.
The verdict, she said, “tells us everything. If we do not want violence on the subways and the point of our justice system is a level of accountability to prevent a person who does not have remorse about taking another person’s life,” she said:
I mean even people who have engaged in manslaughter or have taken a life accidentally express remorse.
The fact that a person has expressed no remorse indicates a risk that it may happen again. And if we do not want to unleash that level of violence then we should exert a level of accountability to prevent that from happening.
Except that Penny didn’t “engage in manslaughter” or any other crime. Or so the jury declared.
X users reacted as expected.
“This is what happens when you have barmaids in Government, no disrespect to barmaids but she only has a BLM Democrat Agenda/Narrative of the facts,” an X user wrote:
EVERYONE on that subway train thanks Daniel Penny because they felt threatened, also Neely was alive when NYC EMT’s arrived but THEY chose not to treat him.
Wrote another:
She only has an issue because Daniel Penny is white.
If an illegal immigrant saved a train full of people that day in the same manner.
We would have a statue already.
“She can say that because she will never be in a situation like this,” another wrote over video of a brutal subway assault.
Another user noted the obvious: Had Neely been in prison where he belonged, he would be alive. Instead, the city permitted him to terrorize subway passengers until someone stopped him, albeit with an unfortunate end:
Yes, had there been accountability for Neely, he wouldn’t have been on the subway threatening people while having a warrant for assault. He wouldn’t have died. He would be in prison instead.
Neely’s unwelcome presence on the subway was partly the fault of District Attorney Alvin Bragg, whom the New York Post roasted in an editorial.
“New Yorkers, rejoice: There’s hope for this town after all,” the editorial said.
How much hope is open to question.
“This was the just outcome of a Kafkaesque ordeal: Penny never should’ve been dragged into court in the first place,” the editorial continued:
But Bragg did it anyway, playing to his hard-left, race-obsessed base.
Bragg’s prosecutors also pounded the race card relentlessly at trial, routinely calling Perry “the white man” and imputing racist motives to his actions, even as witness after witness confirmed that the entire car was terrified by Neely’s behavior on that F train.
In acquitting Penny, the jury resoundingly rejected Bragg’s progressive pro-crime agenda, which has turned Gotham into a playground for recidivist criminals and an open-air psychiatric ward for the mentally unwell.
The editorial called for far-left Governor Kathy Hochul to fire Bragg, who was elected with the backing of Hungarian communist billionaire George Soros.
Hochul has the authority to do so, GOP Representative Mike Lawler wrote for the Post.
