Daniel Penny was found not guilty by a Manhattan jury and has been cleared of all charges for the death of Jordan Neely. Penny placed Neely in a chokehold on the subway to keep him from harassing passengers in May 2023.
Neely, 30, was a homeless street performer and Michael Jackson impersonator who was shouting, throwing things, and making threats on the F train in SoHo. According to Penny and other witnesses, Neely was yelling that someone was “going to die today.”
The homeless street performer was alive when the police got to him, but the police said that they didn’t want to resuscitate him via mouth to mouth because he was dirty and looked as if he could be carrying diseases.
While Allie Beth Stuckey of “Relatable” believes the police reaction is “very sad,” she’s undeniably pleased with the verdict.
“One woman who was on the train, one witness, thanked Penny for saving her life. Another passenger described this rant as a satanic rant, and many passengers said that Daniel Penny actually kept them safe that day,” she comments, adding, “The fact that he was alive when the police found him, that is very significant here.”
The courage that Penny, who is a former Marine, showed in the situation has become increasingly rare and almost impossible to come by — especially considering the way his life changed following the incident.
“We’ve all seen videos go viral on X where a young woman is being either sexually assaulted, is being sexually harassed, and the men around them do absolutely nothing. Either because they’re cowards, they don’t want to be inconvenienced, or because they know something like this is going to happen to them, especially if you have a black suspect,” Stuckey explains.
“That’s just the case, when you’ve got a white person and a black person and the white person even just appears like the aggressor, you know that you are going to lose in the media. You know that you’re going to lose in the court of public opinion,” she adds.
While Penny didn’t lose in the court of public opinion this time, had Neely’s death occurred four years ago, Stuckey believes we’d have seen a different verdict.
“I think if what happened to Jordan Neely happened four years ago, we would have seen a different verdict,” she says. “Which is actually very sad because verdicts should not depend upon the cultural moment, it should not depend upon social media outrage, it shouldn’t depend upon protest or how loud one side is. It should only depend upon the facts.”
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