Days after Daniel Penny was acquitted in Jordan Neely’s chokehold, he will attend an Army-Navy football game Saturday as a guest of newly elected Vice President J.D. Vance.
Vance said Penny accepted his invitation to the game in a message on X Friday morning.
“Daniel is a good guy, and the New York Mafia prosecutor tried to ruin his life because he had a backbone,” Vance wrote. “I am grateful that he accepted my invitation and I hope he can have fun and appreciate how much his fellow citizens admire his courage.”
Like others on the political right, Vance praised Penny as a good Samaritan who helped his fellow citizens cope with a potentially dangerous situation. Neely, a former Michael Jackson impersonator with a history of mental illness, died after Penny held him by the neck for an extended period during an encounter on the New York City subway in 2023.
Penny argued that he only wanted to restrain Neely until the police arrived and had no intention of harming him. A New York City medical examiner ruled that Neely died from compression in his neck as a result of the chokehold.
A jury on Monday acquitted Penny of negligent homicide in Neely’s death after failing to reach an agreement on the second-degree manslaughter charge, which a judge subsequently dismissed.
Penny’s rise to folk hero status on the right resembles the support Kyle Rittenhouse gained among conservatives after he fatally shot two people at a Black Lives Matter protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in 2020. Rittenhouse was acquitted of murder charges in the case, and Donald Trump met with Rittenhouse afterward and praised him as “a really nice young man.”
There are major differences in the details of each case, but the glorification of Penny on the right coincides with the story of rising crime across the country, especially in urban areas like New York City. However, national data crime data suggests the opposite.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
