Today a New York City jury found Marine vet Daniel Penny clear of any criminal wrongdoing in the chokehold death of Jordan Neely on a crowded subway — a caught-on-video killing that gripped, and divided, the nation.
The courtroom erupted in applause as the panelists acquitted Penny of criminally negligent homicide — which could have put him behind bars for up to four years — in Neely’s chokehold death aboard a crowded uptown F train in May 2023.
“We the jury have come to a unanimous decision on county two,” the foreperson on the jury told the courtroom.
Daniel Penny verdict live updates: Not guilty in Jordan Neely’s chokehold death https://t.co/KkGIykCU7c pic.twitter.com/yWT5aTzXBu
— New York Post (@nypost) December 9, 2024
According to the New York Post, reaction from inside the courtroom was filled elation, and anger.
Penny immediately broke out a huge smile and turned to hug defense attorney Thomas Kenniff.
Neely’s father, Andre Zachary, and two supporters were ushered out after audibly reacting.
Another person also left, crying with tears.
“It really, really hurts,” Neely’s father, Andre Zachery, said outside the courthouse. “I had enough of this. The system is rigged.”
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, the Democrat whose office brought the case, said prosecutors “followed the facts and the evidence from beginning to end” and respect the verdict.
Jurors sided with Penny’s defense attorneys, who had argued that the Marine veteran was justified in rushing to protect his fellow subway straphangers when he subdued the erratic homeless man. The lawyers had also questioned whether there was sufficient evidence that the chokehold caused Neely’s death.
“Who do you want on the next train ride with you?” one of his lawyers, Steven Raiser, in his closing statement in Manhattan Supreme Court.
“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?”
The lawyers had also questioned whether there was sufficient evidence that the chokehold caused Neely’s death.
Prosecutors argued that Penny went “too far” — and that his actions turned criminal when he kept Neely in the hold after nearly all of the frightened passengers had fled the train.
However, trial evidence revealed that Neely had the synthetic marijuana drug K2 in his system at the time of the confrontation. Jurors also heard that he was diagnosed with schizophrenia, telling doctors in 2021 that he’d heard the “devil’s voice.”
Penny’s mother, sister, friends and fellow Marines took the stand to vouch for his character.
The defense’s medical expert, forensic pathologist Dr. Satish Chundru, claimed that Neely died not from Penny’s chokehold, but by “the combined effects of sickle cell crisis, the schizophrenia, the struggle and restraint, and the synthetic marijuana.”
Penny declined to take the stand. But jurors heard him tell arriving cops on the train platform, “I just put him out,” before making a choking gesture with his arms.
Hours later, at Chinatown’s 5th Precinct, a relaxed Penny insisted during an interrogation that he was merely trying to “de-escalate the situation” and that he didn’t mean to hurt Neely.
The polarizing case led to many national conversations about Neely as a man who was failed by the city’s broken system — a sentiment even New York City Mayor Eric Adams expressed, saying Penny did “what we should have done as a city” by protecting others that day.
While the criminal trial played out, Neely’s father filed a wrongful death suit against Penny.