by WorldTribune Staff / 247 Real News December 9, 2024

Former Marine Daniel Penny was acquitted by a Manhattan jury on Monday of criminally negligent homicide in the death of Jordan Neely on a New York City subway last year.

Penny had previously faced a more serious second-degree manslaughter charge, but Judge Maxwell Wiley dismissed that charge on Friday at the request of prosecutors after jurors twice told the court they could not come to a verdict on the count.

Penny, 26, would have faced up to four years in prison for a criminally negligent homicide conviction and up to 15 years for a manslaughter conviction.

Human Events editor Jack Posobiec noted in a social media post: “Daniel Penny did nothing wrong. In fact Daniel Penny did everything right. Can we talk about Derek Chauvin now?”

Related: Derek Chauvin’s final appeal? The U.S. Supreme Court opts for expedience, December 26, 2023

The jury deliberated for just over an hour before finding Penny not guilty on the criminally negligent homicide charge.

On the second-degree manslaughter charge, the jury deliberated for 16 hours before telling the judge they were deadlocked, and another three hours before saying they were deadlocked again.

On May 1, 2023, Neely, a 30-year-old with a reported history of mental illness and drug abuse, entered a subway car and began yelling and was a threat to passenger safety, witnesses said.

Penny, a passenger, put Neely in a chokehold and restrained him for several minutes. When Penny let go of the hold, Neely was nonresponsive. He was later declared dead.

“I wasn’t trying to injure him,” Penny said in an interview with NYPD investigators shortly after the incident. “I’m just trying to keep him from hurting anybody else. He was threatening.”

The city medical examiner who performed Neely’s autopsy testified for the prosecution, saying she ruled the cause of his death was “compression of neck (chokehold).” She made the determination after performing an autopsy and watching the cell phone video on the subway but did not wait for the toxicology report, she testified.

The defense presented its own medical expert who said Neely died of a combination of factors, including a sickling crisis linked to his sickle cell trait, a schizophrenic episode, the struggle and restraint by Penny, and K2 intoxication.

“We are here today because the defendant used way too much force for way too long in way too reckless of a manner,” prosecutor Dafna Yoran said in closing arguments.

Penny’s defense said he was acting to protect others from a threat.

Defense attorney Steven Raiser told jurors to imagine themselves on the train when Neely got on “filled with rage and not afraid of any consequences. You’re sitting much as you are now, in this tightly confined space. You have very little room to move and none to run. Danny acted to save those people. Raiser also said that “Danny could not foresee a sickling death,” so “he is not guilty.”

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