A Marine veteran who used a chokehold on an agitated subway passenger was acquitted Monday in a death that became a prism for differing views on public safety, courage and willfulness.
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A Manhattan jury has acquitted Daniel Penny of negligent homicide in the 2023 death of Jordan Neely. A more serious manslaughter charge was dismissed last week as the jury deadlocked on that point.
Penny, who had shown little expression during the trial, smiled briefly as the verdict was read. The courtroom erupted in both applause and anger, and Neely’s father and two supporters were led out after audibly reacting. Another person also left, crying with tears.
“It really hurts,” Neely’s father, Andre Zachery, said outside the courthouse. “I had enough. The system has been manipulated.”
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, the Democrat whose office brought the case, said prosecutors “followed the facts and evidence from beginning to end” and respected the verdict.
There was no immediate comment from lawyers for Penny, who rushed to a waiting car after the verdict. The anonymous jury, which had begun deliberating on Tuesday, was escorted from the courtroom to a van.
Penny’s lawyers had said he was protecting himself and other subway passengers from a volatile, mentally ill man who made alarming comments and gestures.
The case reinforced many American fault lines, including race, politics, crime, city life, mental illness and homelessness. Neely was black. Penny is white.
There were sometimes dueling demonstrations outside the courthouse, including on Monday when chants could be heard through the courtroom window ahead of the verdict. High-profile Republican politicians portrayed Penny as a hero, while prominent Democrats attended Neely’s funeral.
Penny, 26, served in the Marines for four years and went on to study architecture.
Neely, 30, was once a subway performer with a tragic life story: His mother was murdered and stuffed in a suitcase when he was a teenager.
As a younger man, Neely performed Michael Jackson tributes – complete with moonwalks – on the city streets and subways. But Neely also struggled with mental illness after losing his mother, whose boyfriend was convicted of her murder.
He was subsequently diagnosed with depression and schizophrenia, was repeatedly hospitalized and used the synthetic cannabinoid K2. He realized that this negatively affected his thinking and behavior, according to the medical records seen during the trial. The drug was in his system when he died.
Neely told a doctor in 2017 that being homeless, living in poverty and having to “dig through the garbage” for food made him feel so hopeless that he sometimes thought about killing himself, hospital records show.
About six years later, he boarded the subway beneath Manhattan on May 1, 2023, threw his coat on the floor and declared that he was hungry and thirsty and that he didn’t care whether he died or went to jail, witnesses said. Some told 911 operators that he was trying to attack people or indicated that he would harm passengers, and several testified that they were scared.
Neely was unarmed, with nothing but a muffin in his pocket, and did not touch any passengers. One of them said he made lunging movements that alarmed her so much that she shielded her five-year-old child from him.
Penny came up behind Neely, grabbed his neck, took him to the ground and “killed him,” as the veteran told police at the scene.
Passenger video showed that at one point during the roughly six-minute wait, Neely tapped an onlooker’s leg and gestured to him. Later he was given an arm free. But he stayed quiet for almost a minute before Penny let him go.
“He’s dying,” an unseen bystander said in a video. “Let him go!”
A witness who intervened to hold Neely’s arms testified that he told Penny to free the man, although Penny’s lawyers noted that the witness’s story changed significantly over time.
Penny told detectives shortly after the encounter that Neely threatened to kill people and that the chokehold was an attempt to “de-escalate” the situation until police could arrive. The veteran said he lasted so long because Neely squirmed occasionally.
‘I wasn’t trying to hurt him. I’m just trying to keep him from hurting anyone else. He threatens people. That’s what we teach in the Marine Corps,” Penny told investigators.
However, one of Penny’s Marine Corps instructors testified that the veteran misused a strangulation technique he had been taught.
Prosecutors said Penny reacted far too forcefully to someone he viewed as a danger, not a person. Prosecutors also argued that the need to protect passengers quickly faded when the train doors opened at the next station, seconds after Penny took action.
Although Penny himself told police he had used “a chokehold,” one of his attorneys, Steven Raiser, called it a Marine-taught chokehold “modified as a simple civilian restraint.” Defense attorneys argued that Penny did not consistently apply enough pressure to kill Neely.
Contradicting the findings of a city medical examiner, a pathologist hired by the defense said Neely did not die from the chokehold, but from the combined effects of K2, schizophrenia, his struggles and self-control, and a blood disorder that can lead to fatal complications during exercise .
Penny did not testify, but several of his family members, friends and fellow Marines did – describing him as a genuine, patriotic and empathetic man.
The manslaughter charge would require proving that Penny recklessly caused Neely’s death. Murder due to criminal negligence involves the commission of serious “culpable behavior” while failing to recognize such a risk. Both charges were felonies and carried the possibility of prison time.
As the criminal trial unfolded, Neely’s father filed a wrongful death suit against Penny.
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Associated Press journalists Joseph B. Frederick and Ted Shaffrey contributed.
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