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Good morning. It’s Monday. Today we’ll take a closer look at the verdict that cleared Daniel Penny in the chokehold death of Jordan Neely, a fellow passenger on an F train who witnesses said had been shouting at riders.
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Jefferson Siegel for The New York Times |
In May 2023, Daniel Penny, a man on an F train, put a disruptive passenger, Jordan Neely, in a chokehold, and Neely died. Penny is a former Marine who was studying for a bachelor’s degree in architecture. Neely was homeless and had struggled with mental problems for years.
The case quickly became a touchstone in the debate on crime and mental illness. Some New Yorkers said that Penny was responsible for Neely’s unnecessary death, while others said that Penny’s actions reflected the fear shared by many transit riders.
The police charged Penny with second-degree manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide.
The first charge was dismissed on Dec. 6 after the jury reported that it was deadlocked. Last week
the jurors acquitted Penny on the other charge.
I asked Hurubie Meko, who has covered the case since Penny’s arrest, to look at the verdict and put the case in a larger context.
The jurors seem to have had a hard time with this case. First they deadlocked on the manslaughter charge. Then they found Penny not guilty of criminally negligent homicide.
We don’t know exactly what happened in the jury room, but it does seem that the jurors were talking their way through the facts of the case. Over their days of deliberation, they sent about a dozen notes to the judge. At least one asked that they be sent home for the day.
But many were requests for transcripts and videos — and for the judge to clarify or reread his instructions. And yes, they did send two notes last Friday saying they had deadlocked on the second-degree manslaughter charge, at which point the judge granted the prosecution’s request to dismiss the charge.
The charge that they came to a verdict on was criminally negligent homicide, a lower felony that carries a maximum prison sentence of up to four years. In comparison, manslaughter has a maximum of 15 years.
What was the difference between the two charges?
The main difference hinged on intent. According to the instructions the judge gave the jury, to find Penny guilty of manslaughter the jurors had to determine, in part, that he had acted recklessly and that his actions had created and contributed to a substantial and unjustifiable risk that Neely’s death would occur.
For criminally negligent homicide, under state law, a person fails to perceive the risk, and that failure to perceive that risk is a deviation “from the standard of care that a reasonable person would observe.”
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Jordan Neely was killed when Daniel Penny put him in a chokehold on the F train. Ahmed Gaber for The New York Times |
What issues has this case brought into the conversation?
This case has touched off a lot of debates over how to address crime and justice, homelessness, mental illness and race.
Some people saw Neely as the embodiment of a system that had broken down, letting vulnerable people slip through the cracks. Others saw the episode as emblematic of a city struggling to control crime on the subway, many involving homeless and mentally ill people, and of the city’s inability to keep residents safe.
The city has tried to help people who are struggling with mental illness, but problems persist.
A New York Times investigation last year
found that there was a breakdown between the patchwork of agencies the city has tasked with helping this population. In part, the city’s homeless shelters place people in the wrong settings, hospitals release people in crisis before they’re stable and many of the agencies are bound by privacy laws and can’t share information about their patients. And the city
has often failed at keeping the most vulnerable people from hurting themselves or others.
Mayor Eric Adams has attempted to address such concerns in his nearly three years in office by
flooding the transit system with police officers, as well as by using gun-detecting technology
to scan riders and by dispatching teams to
remove mentally ill people from the system.
The case also reignited conservatives’ anger at the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, who charged Donald Trump with 34 felonies and won a conviction on each charge. The verdict boosted Penny’s star on the right, with Republicans like Vice President-elect JD Vance, Donald Trump Jr. and former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani praising the jurors. On Saturday, Penny attended the Army-Navy football game at Vance’s invitation and
met Trump.
Neely was a former Michael Jackson impersonator who had deteriorated into homelessness and was mentally ill. He was on a list of homeless people at risk. How had the city tried to help him?
The list Neely was on before his death was informally known as the Top 50, although it didn’t have a fixed number — and there are actually two lists, one of people who typically stay on the subways, another for people who usually stay on the streets. The lists were compiled informally by outreach workers. The people on the lists stood out for the severity of their troubles and their resistance to accepting help.
In his last years of life, Neely had been estranged from his family. He was homeless and had moved in and out of shelters and hospitals.
If they see people on the list, homeless-outreach workers are, in some cases, supposed to notify the city and try to get them into a shelter.
His relatives have also said they tried to help him. Christopher Neely, Neely’s uncle, said he would drive around Manhattan looking for his nephew, hoping to offer him food and shelter.
The verdict can’t be appealed, but the legal fight is not over, is it?
No. While the jury was still deliberating, Neely’s father, Andre Zachery, filed a civil lawsuit against Penny, saying that he had caused his son’s death through “negligence, carelessness and recklessness.”
Following the verdict, Zachery’s lawyer, Donte Mills, said the family was turning to their next legal battle.
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