Free Daniel Penny “This trial is not about heroes and villains.” Actually, it is. by Mark Tapson
https://www.frontpagemag.com/free-daniel-penny/
As conservatives bask in the glow of a new morning in America, we mustn’t lose sight of a consequential, ongoing news story that deserves our attention.
Opening statements began last Friday in the trial of Daniel Penny, a 25-year-old former Marine who faces up to 19 years in prison on charges related to the death of Jordan Neely, a homeless, mentally ill Michael Jackson impersonator who was (insert obligatory “allegedly”) threatening passengers on a New York City subway in May 2023 until Penny subdued him in a chokehold. Neely died later at the scene.
Penny’s lawyers Thomas Kenniff and Steven Raiser are arguing that he acted to protect the other passengers from Neely, whom one witness described as ranting in an “insanely threatening” way, including declaring “I want to hurt people,” that “someone is going to die today,” and that he wanted “to go to prison.” Court documents from the incident indicate that fellow passengers feared for their lives, The Daily Wire reported.
Penny’s attorneys are not only arguing that their client’s chokehold was justified due to this menacing behavior, but are also questioning whether the chokehold even caused Neely’s death. The medical examiner never provided specific evidence to support the claim that Neely died of asphyxiation, the New York Post reported.
“Some people say I was trying to choke him to death, which is also not true. I was trying to restrain him,” Penny has said, according to The Daily Wire. “You can see in the video there’s a clear rise and fall of his chest, indicating that he’s breathing. I’m trying to restrain him from being able to carry out the threats.”
But prosecutors in the Manhattan office of Left-wing activist District Attorney Alvin Bragg don’t need to prove Penny intended to kill in order to convict him. They only need to convince jurors that Penny “recklessly” caused Neely’s death, whereupon they can convict Penny of second-degree manslaughter.
Penny also faces another charge with a lower burden of proof: criminally negligent homicide. To convict him of that, the jury will need to be convinced that Penny disregarded a “substantial and unjustifiable risk of death” when he restrained Neely for six minutes.
Kenniff told The Daily Wire last week that “The prosecution is going to have to prove, not only that our client Danny Penny caused Mr. Neely’s death, but that he foresaw the risk of death and consciously disregarded it – realized, ‘I may be about to kill this guy, I’m not intending to do it, but I really don’t care if I do,’” the attorney added.’
Bragg’s office has countered that Penny may not have intended to kill Neely, but knew that such a chokehold can sometimes be fatal. The prosecutors will also stress that Penny pinned the unarmed Neely for six minutes, restraining him even after the homeless man seemed to no longer present a danger.
“The notion that death is not a foreseeable consequence of squeezing someone’s neck for six minutes is beyond the pale,” the DA’s office wrote in a November 2023 court filing.
Defense lawyer Julie Rendelman said prosecutors would be making a mistake if they argue that Neely was “no danger to anyone” before Penny stepped in. “You may lose some of those jurors who have been on the train many times, threatened by different individuals on many occasions,” she said. “They really have to approach it in a way that recognizes that, but also recognizes that he went too far.”
“Penny’s defense team will put jurors in that train car and challenge them with what the safest response would be in the face of Neely’s chaos,” said defense attorney and former Brooklyn prosecutor Jason Goldman. They also may bring up Neely’s chronic abuse of the drug K2, which was in his system when he died.
It is unclear if Penny himself will testify. Rendelman told The Post, “This is one of the cases where it is likely that the jury is going to want to hear from Penny, because part of that justification is going to be about what he perceived at the time that the events were happening. What was going through his mind at every step of the way?”
The trial is expected to last four to six weeks. If Penny is convicted, his fate lies in the hands of Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Maxwell Wiley. Of the twelve jurors selected, seven are women and five are men. Four of them are “people of color.” Several noted that they had personally witnessed or been victimized by subway outbursts in the past.
Let’s be real: if the races were reversed and Penny were a black man who subdued a threatening, white homeless man, the incident would never have made national news. There likely would not even be an arrest. We all know that a two-tier system of justice exists now throughout the West, in which the despised oppressor class of white heterosexual males is targeted for political retribution while the protected classes are, well, protected.
“This trial is not about heroes and villains,” said Kenniff. “Danny was not looking to alter the course of anyone else’s life and certainly was not looking to alter the course of his own.”
Actually, it is about heroes and villains. Daniel Penny is a hero. He did what heroes do, what men of conscience and courage do, which is put their own safety at risk to defend the defenseless. Not only should he never have been arrested, he should be given some kind of civic commendation in a public ceremony to encourage others to follow his moral example. God knows New York subway strapholders need some kind of assurance that they will be protected from unpredictable menaces like Jordan Neely, who instead is being honored by the gauntlet of Black Lives Matter protesters outside the courthouse as yet another innocent black martyr to white supremacy.
The villains here are the progressive prosecutors in Alvin Bragg’s office who are targeting Penny because he is a white man and his purported victim was black. These prosecutors even began referring to Penny as “the white man” or “the white guy” during testimony from a frightened witness who recorded video of Penny restraining Neely. Defense attorney Kenniff had to remind them that “the white guy” has a name.
There are two endgames for progressives in this trial: one is to make an example of Daniel Penny and punish his whiteness and masculinity, because progressives hate both. The other is to foster a climate of lawless chaos in which criminals, especially those “of color,” are given broad leeway to rampage through society – e.g., rioting, looting, committing random racist or misogynist violence, committing hate crimes against whites, Asians and Jews – partly as reparations for centuries of perceived oppression and partly to demoralize the bourgeois populace, making them easier to control.
Daniel Penny is being railroaded into an outrageous prison sentence by racist ideologues in the D.A.’s office. A moral society must not stand for this shameful politicization of justice.
Free Daniel Penny now.
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