Daniel Penny walks into a Manhattan courtroom, back and stoic, having faced the crowd of BLM protesters outside the building.
But from the 13th floor courtroom, which was packed with journalists and supporters of Jordan Neely, voices from street level could still be heard.
The riot below confirms the fraught nature of this case, which has been exposed to the madness of our ultra progressive, soft on crime prosecutor Alvin Bragg, letting the mentally ill, violent criminals roam free while the good people of Gotham left to dare this challenge.
Unfortunately for Penny, she steps up as a maid. A defender.
For the actions of Samaritan, the ex-Marine, who was painted white as a racist vigilante, “subway strangler” and faces charges of second-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter for the death of Neely, a mentally ill man, a homeless man and a street performer. , which threatens the strahangers. Penny put unarmed Neely, who is black, in a chokehold which the medical examiner said killed him.
He now 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 Penny’s jurors in opening statements Friday.
Both show very different pictures of what happened during the chokehold. Yoran said Marine veterans are specifically trained in chokeholds. He knows his power. He was “too far” – and rude.
He further added that Penny – who is trained in CPR – did not try to revive Neely, but grabbed the hat that had fallen on his head, dusted it off and waited for the police. The line caught the attention of Neely’s supporters.
“Jordan Neely took his last breath on the dirty floor of the F train uptown – 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 every day … as New Yorkers, we train ourselves not to engage. Not to make eye contact. To pretend that people like Jordan Neely don’t exist. “
And on May 1, 2023, “Jordan Neely asked to be seen,” he said, adding that “his actions that day were very frightening” on the train.
As a regular subway rider who has been in a pepper spray scrum, assaulted and physically threatened multiple times, I would say petrified is a better adjective. Even though we weren’t in the car, we knew the terror.
Defense attorney Thomas Kenniff said Neeley was “sad, psychotic” and full of “uncontrollable rage.” He lunged at the woman and the mother jumped in front of the baby carriage. He said he was ready to go to Rikers and threatened to kill him.
Kenniff, says client “Danny” “does what other people want for us.”
But Yoran says that Penny’s actions are too much to use the minutes and seconds metric.
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. However, he said, Penny still maintained a chokehold for five minutes and 53 seconds.
Fear and threat, however, are not measured in seconds or minutes.
Especially when held captive in an underground tube by a snarling vagrant who has no regard for human life, including his own.
Those 30 seconds can feel like five minutes, five minutes, a lifetime. And this is all happening in the middle of a wave of random violence, even killing on the subway.
And even though the passengers were empty, Neely was still a threat to the people on the platform if he would break free.
“The fight lasted five to six minutes. But Danny did not, and could not, have squeezed his neck. We know because if he had, Neely would have died in the first minute,” said Kenniff.
Both said the video would provide important evidence – and jurors saw footage of medics’ unsuccessful attempts to revive Neely.
“This review is not about heroes and villains,” Kenniff said. “Danny doesn’t want to change the course of other people’s lives and he certainly doesn’t want to change the course of his own.”
Neely’s life and death are tragedies, which are now in doubt. Her mother was murdered by her boyfriend when she was only 14. Relatives say she found solace in dancing and performing on the train. But he went a number of ways, became homeless and was arrested for violent assault.
Neely’s story is the pinnacle of social failure on many levels.
But a penny shouldn’t pay for a broken system.
