New York City jury decides on ‘subway vigilante’ case

Daniel Penny was charged with killing a man who threatened passengers

A former US marine who restrained a mentally ill homeless man to defend passengers on a commuter train in New York City in 2023 has been found not guilty of criminally negligent homicide by a Manhattan jury. Prosecutors had charged Daniel Penny with killing Jordan Neely and argued he was motivated by racism.

Penny was on a train in May 2023 when Neely entered the car and started shouting that “someone is going to die today.” With two of his friends, the ex-marine restrained Neely and called police and an ambulance. Neely later died in a hospital, and the local authorities pressed charges against Penny.

On Monday, the Manhattan jury found Penny not guilty of criminally negligent homicide. Judge Maxwell Wiley had already thrown out the primary charge of second-degree manslaughter on Friday, when the jurors could not agree on a verdict.

“Who do you want on the next train ride with you?” one of Penny’s lawyers, Steven Raiser, said in his closing arguments last week. “The guy with the earbuds minding his own business who you know would be there for you if something happened? Or perhaps you just hope that someone like Jordan Neely does not enter that train when you are all alone, all alone in a crowd of others frozen with fear?”

“What’s so tragic about this case is that even though the defendant started out trying to do the right thing, as the chokehold progressed, the defendant knew that Jordan Neely was in great distress and dying, and he needlessly continued,” prosecutor Dafna Yoran said in her closing statement.

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Yoran and her team had referred to Penny as “the white man” throughout the trial, giving the affair a racial dimension. Two of Penny’s black friends, who had helped him subdue Neely, were not charged.

The case polarized both New York and the US, with one side arguing that Penny was a racist murderer and Neely was a mentally ill man failed by the city and the state, while the other held up the former Marine as a hero who deserved a medal and not an indictment.

Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat and black himself, said earlier this month that Penny did “what we should have done as a city” by protecting others.

The trial heard from over 40 witnesses, from passengers who were in the car with Penny and Neely that day to medical experts. The city’s medical examiner, Dr. Cynthia Harris, ruled that Neely’s death had been a homicide caused by Penny’s chokehold based on watching a six-minute video recorded by one of the witnesses.

The defense’s medical expert, Dr. Satish Chundru, claimed that Neely died from “the combined effects of sickle cell crisis, the schizophrenia, the struggle and restraint, and the synthetic marijuana.” A toxicology report showed the presence of the drug K2 in Neely’s system.

Speaking with the police after the incident, Penny said he was “not trying to kill the guy,” but “just trying to keep him from hurting anybody else.”

Police had previously noted Neely as an “emotionally disturbed person” who had been detained or arrested over two dozen times, but he was never checked into a mental institution.