Daniel Penny, a Marine veteran, was found not guilty of killing homeless subway rider Jordan Neely by choking him on Monday. This made leftists very angry on social media.
Penny was found not guilty by a jury in Manhattan of criminally negligent homicide, a charge that carried a possible four-year term. Second-degree manslaughter was a more serious charge with a possible 15-year sentence. Judge Maxwell Wiley dropped the charge last week after jurors told the court twice they couldn’t decide what to do.
In May 2023, Penny, a 26-year-old architecture student and member of the Marines, was charged with manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide for putting Neely in a chokehold and killing her. At the time, Neely, a 30-year-old homeless man with schizophrenia who was wanted for arrest, jumped on the train while high on K2, a type of fake marijuana. He yelled death threats. During the fight, Penny choked Neely by grabbing him from behind. Neely later died.
The case got a lot of attention and led to discussions about public safety, mental illness, and homelessness on New York City’s train system. Prosecutors said Penny killed Neely by using too much force, while Penny’s defense said he was just defending other people on the subway who were in danger because of Neely’s outburst.
After the jury’s ruling on Monday, liberal commentators said they thought it was because of racism and bias against the homeless and the poor.
“Just think about what would have happened if Jordan Neely had been white and Daniel Penny had been black. Just think about what some of the people who would protect Penny today would say. “Just imagine,” wrote Mehdi Hasan, a former MSNBC host.
According to Tiffany Cabán, Council member for NYC Council District 22 in Queens, New York, “everything that happened before and after Daniel Penny lynched Jordan Neely on a New York City subway train could have and should have been stopped.” They wrote this on Bluesky.
“Jordan Neely deserved better than being violently denied stable housing and medical care and then being called names because of it.” It’s not fair that Jordan Neely had to deal with systems that allow and excuse white supremacist violence against Black people without due process, she said.
“When Jordan Neely was 30, he was having a hard time with mental illness, drug abuse, and not having a place to live. He did shows in the subways of New York City. Danial Perry choked Mr. Neely to death. Penny wasn’t found guilty of anything by a judge, not a jury. A activist and actor named Mia Farrow also wrote, “I don’t understand.” She told him that Penny was white and Neely was black in her answer.
“Confirmation, not that it was needed,” Jack Mirkinson, senior editor for The Nation, wrote on Bluesky. “That our society does not see homeless people as people.”
“I can’t believe how happy people are on Twitter right now that Daniel Penny got away with killing Jordan Neely, a homeless Black man with mental health problems.” “It’s disgusting,” the famous account Brooklyn Dad Defiant, which has over 385k followers, wrote on Bluesky.
“That Daniel Penny and Daniel Perry and Kyle Rittenhouse and George Zimmerman are all walking around free in the most carceral nation in the world is something that demands a reckoning,” writer Joe Katz said.
“Daniel Penny is a racist, sexist, and ableist killer.” “He should be shamed forever, no matter what a court does or doesn’t do to him,” Tim Wise, a senior fellow at the African American Policy Forum, wrote on X after Penny’s more serious charge was dropped. Over 4 million people saw the post over the weekend.
Several lefties on Bluesky linked Penny’s release from prison and the recent murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
“I guess we don’t need to look for the CEO killer anymore; vigilante killing is legal in NYC,” wrote another Bluesky account with almost 47,000 followers.
Black Lives Matter supporters in New York had said they would protest if Penny was found not guilty.
Hawk Newsome, co-founder of New York Black Lives Matter, told reporters after Penny’s release that “we need some Black vigilantes.”
“Do people want to kill us and choke us for being loud?” Why don’t we do the same thing when they try to hurt us?” he added.
