How ex-Marine who fatally strangled black man on New York subway walked free from court in case that polarised America over race once again: TOM LEONARD

New Yorkers in the city’s dirty, noisy and teeth-grindingly unreliable subway system try to avoid the trouble if they can possibly help it.

Because passengers are sometimes thrown onto the tracks, stabbed or even shot, the risks of intervening in threatening or violent behavior are well known.

It is much better to change carriages or even take another train, especially given the notorious unpredictability of the usual troublemakers: mentally ill and usually drug-addicted homeless people.

And discretion has invariably proven to be the better part of courage in such situations – until one day last May, when a passenger named Daniel Penny decided he wasn’t going to ignore an erratic drifter who was driving him and other people riding on an F-line , endangered. train.

Penny, a well-built architecture student and former U.S. Marine who was 24 at the time, grabbed Jordan Neely from behind and brought him to the ground.

While a black passenger helped subdue the struggling Neely by holding his arms, Penny put him in a chokehold with his arms wrapped around his neck. As he waited for police, he held on for six minutes — a fatal decision, prosecutors said. Neely, 30, was pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital.

Yesterday, 19 months after the fatal encounter, Penny – who was jailed for up to 15 years – sensationally walked free. He was unanimously acquitted by a jury on charges of negligent homicide. A more serious crime, manslaughter, was dismissed Friday because jurors could not agree on a verdict.

The Penny trial has deeply polarized Americans – and there were scenes of scuffles outside the Manhattan courthouse yesterday as crowds protested the not guilty verdict. It mattered to many that Neely was black and Penny was white, a distinction that quickly made the case a cause celebre.

A video – taken by a fellow passenger – captured several minutes of the chokehold and its aftermath. It went viral and increased tensions. “You’re going to be charged with murder,” a passenger is heard telling Penny. “You have to let him go.” You see Neely eventually go limp.

Prosecutors never directly accused Penny of acting out of racial animosity (although they did hint as much during his trial). But he faced accusations from many others, which he vehemently denied, that he was a white supremacist.

Left-wing politicians called it a “lynching” carried out by a dangerous vigilante group, while lawyers for Neely’s family argued that Penny, as a trained soldier, knew how to restrain someone without killing him and should therefore be charged with murder.

Even some who didn’t rush to condemn Penny as a racist instead castigated him for failing to show enough “empathy” toward the homeless (the majority of whom in New York are black).

Hundreds of mourners, including senior Democrats and civil rights leaders, attended Neely’s funeral, where the Rev. Al Sharpton told them, “Jordan didn’t irritate anyone on the train.” Jordan screamed for help.”

He continued, “When they strangled Jordan, they put their arms around us.” He didn’t say who he meant by “they.”

Neely’s family admitted he had had his “demons” but said he had never physically assaulted anyone. Protesters, outraged that Penny was not immediately arrested, even jumped onto the subway to express their disgust.

New York’s Democratic governor, Kathy Hochul, intervened, claiming it was “very clear” that Neely would not hurt anyone. Yet countless others rallied behind Penny, with an online legal appeal to pay for his defense, raising more than $2 million in donations in just two days. Some supporters, such as Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, called Penny a “Good Samaritan.”

Overnight, Penny became a hero to those who saw his case as the embodiment of everything that has gone wrong with a “progressive” justice system that allows criminals to go free and forces law-abiding citizens into their own hands to take.

According to their critics, left-wing prosecutors allowed too many dangerous criminals – including the mentally ill – to roam free in an effort to keep prison numbers low and prevent discrimination against impoverished ethnic minorities by imposing cash bail.

And it is the mentally ill who have been left to fend for themselves on the streets and in the subways, following the US decision in the 1970s to institutionalize only the most desperate cases.

The tragic result of all this, say Penny’s sympathizers, is that a public-spirited citizen felt compelled to take on one of the deranged vagrants who have made the New York subway their home.

Some of Penny’s critics compared his behavior to Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, who fatally knelt on George Floyd’s neck in May 2020, sparking the Black Lives Matter protests.

Neely, who had a long history of paranoid schizophrenia and drug abuse, had more than 40 arrests, including for a series of brutal attacks on the elderly. In 2015, he was arrested for trying to kidnap a seven-year-old girl he saw dragging him down the street.

The trial found that Neely was such a notorious troublemaker that he was included on an unofficial Top 50 list compiled by New York officials of the city’s most seriously mentally ill people.

One of Penny’s lawyers described Neely as an “unhinged lunatic.” Relatives said his mental health problems began 15 years earlier when his mother was strangled by her boyfriend and her body dumped in a suitcase.

Penny’s month-long trial heard from witnesses who described how Neely boarded a train on May 1, 2023 and began screaming, throwing his coat on the ground and striding through the carriage.

Neely, who sometimes tried to earn tips as a Michael Jackson impersonator doing the Moonwalk along horse-drawn carriages, shouted that he was hungry, that he wanted to go back to prison and that he didn’t care if he lived or died because he was ready to to ‘kill’. a motherf*****,” Manhattan Criminal Court heard.

Although attorneys for Penny, who never took a stand, maintained that he restrained Neely because he feared the homeless man would hurt other passengers, some said they were more alarmed by Penny’s stranglehold. All but two of the eleven witnesses who testified said they had never had such a terrifying experience on the subway.

Prosecutors never questioned Penny’s motive for initially targeting Neely, with Dafna Yoran, an assistant district attorney, calling it “even commendable.”

However, the crux of their case was that Penny was ‘reckless’ and ‘went way too far’, leaving Neely under her control for too long. They told jurors that as a former Marine, Penny was trained to use such holds and should have known he risked killing Neely — and that he refused to let go even when others warned him.

A forensic psychiatrist told the court Neely had been hospitalized more than a dozen times for psychotic episodes and synthetic cannabis abuse. Neely had hallucinated he was having conversations with the late gangster rapper Tupac Shakur and thought he was hearing the voice of the devil, the court heard.

In her closing statement yesterday, however, Assistant District Attorney Yoran emphasized that “no one had to die” because “much less than lethal physical force would have protected the passengers from Mr. Neely.”

Critics accused Yoran and fellow prosecutors of repeatedly playing the race card — calling Penny “the white man” in court and claiming the suspect “didn’t recognize that Jordan Neely was a person… he saw him as a person who needed to be eliminated’.

Yoran warned the jurors that their judgment should not be influenced by whether they themselves would be grateful for Penny’s intervention. “You’re not here to decide whether you want to ride the train alone with Jordan Neely,” she said. “That’s not what this case is about.”

It appears the jurors were among the many Americans who disagreed with her.