Daniel Penny walked into a Manhattan courtroom, shoulders back and stoic, already having endured a crowd of BLM protesters outside of the buildlng.
And yet from the 13th floor courtroom, which was packed with reporters and supporters of Jordan Neely, the noise from street level was still audible.
The commotion below underscored the fraught nature of this case, which has exposed the lunacy of our ultra progressive, soft on crime prosecutor Alvin Bragg, letting mentally ill, violent criminals roam free while the good people of Gotham are left to brave this gauntlet.
Unfortunately for Penny, he stepped up to be a helper. A defender.
For for his samaritan act, the former Marine, who is white was smeared as a racist vigilante, a “subway strangler” and is facing second degree manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide for the death of Neely, a mentally ill, homeless man and street performer, who was threatening straphangers. Penny put an unarmed Neely, who was black, in a chokehold which the medical examiner said killed him.
Now he faces up to 15 years in prison.
“This man, took it upon himself to take down Jordan Neely. To neutralize him,” prosecutor Dafna Yoran told jurors of Penny during opening statements Friday.
The two sides presenting vastly different pictures of what transpired during the chokehold. Yoran argued the Marine veteran was specifically trained in chokeholds. He understood their potency. He “went too far” – and was criminally negligent.
She further added that Penny — trained in CPR — didn’t attempt to revive Neely, but instead grabbed his hat that had fallen of his head, dusted himself off and waited for police. The line drew gasps from Neely’s supporters.
“Jordan Neely took his last breaths on the dirty floor of an uptown F train – at the time he died he was 30 years old, homeless, on synthetic drugs, and suffering from mental illness,” she said.
“We pass people like Jordan Neely everyday … as New Yorkers we train ourselves not to engage. Not to make eye contact. To pretend that people like Jordan Neely are not there. “
And on May 1, 2023, “Jordan Neely demanded to be seen,” she said adding that his “actions that day scared many” on the train.
As a regular subway rider who has been in a pepper spray scrum, assaulted and physically threatened many times, I’d say petrified is a better adjective. Even if we weren’t physically in that car, we know that terror.
Defense attorney Thomas Kenniff said Neeley was “seething, psychotic” and filled with “unhinged rage.” He lunged at women and a mother jumped in front of her baby carriage. He said he was ready to go to Rikers and threatened to kill.
Kenniff, said his client “Danny” “did for others what we would want someone to do for us.”
But Yoran argued that Penny’s actions were excessive using metrics of minutes and seconds.
The train took only 30 seconds to travel from the Second Avenue stop to Broadway Lafayette where passengers emptied the train and many called 911. And yet, she said, Penny still maintained the chokehold for five minutes and 53 seconds.
Fear and threats however, are not measured in seconds or minutes.
Especially when captive in an underground tube with a snarling vagrant showing no regard for human life, including his own.
Those 30 seconds can feel like five minutes, those five minutes, a lifetime. And this all happened amidst a wave of random, even deadly acts of violence on the subway.
And even if passengers had emptied out, Neely was still a threat to folks on the platform if he were to break free.
“This struggle did last five to six minutes. But Danny was not, and could not, have been squeezing his neck. We know that because if he was, Neely would have passed out in the first minute,” said Kenniff.
Both sides said that video will provide key evidence in their favor – and jurors saw footage of medics unsuccessfully attempting to revive Neely.
“This trial is not about heroes and villains,” said Kenniff. “Danny was not looking to alter the course of anyone else’s life and certainly was not looking to alter the course of his own.”
The life and death of Neely is a tragedy, of that there is now doubt. His mother was murdered by her boyfriend when he was only 14. Relatives said he found solace in dancing and performing in the subway. But he spiraled in a myriad of ways, became homeless and had arrests for violent assaults.
Neely’s story is culmination of societal failures on many levels.
But Penny shouldn’t have to pay for that broken system.
