Penny for your Thoughts
Digesting Daniel Penny's verdict
Yesterday lucidity prevailed and a jury in New York City found Daniel Penny not guilty for criminally negligent homicide and manslaughter for the death of Jordan Neely. Despite this favorable result, it would be delusional to think that anyone in NYC is safer by this outcome.
For those unaware, on May 1st, 2023, Neely boarded a subway train and when the doors closed and the train was in motion, he began to intimidate passengers at random, according to eyewitnesses. Neely – homeless at the time and with a criminal history spanning 42 arrests for misdemeanors, some violent – yelled at the passengers, “I don't have food, I don't have a drink, I'm fed up. I don't mind going to jail and getting life in prison. I'm ready to die.” He lunged at passengers, inducing a mother to hide her child behind a stroller as another witness heard Neely say, “Someone is going to die today.” Against this looming threat, retired Marine Daniel Penny intervened and a scuffle ensued, during which Penny wound up choking Neely to death as he and two other passengers attempted to neutralize Neely.
The incident hit me hard when I first read about it. In NYC I was born and raised, and there I lived for most of my adult life. As any native New Yorker will tell you, if you ride the subway long enough, you will see everything; borderline personalities, schizos, fanatics, perverts… If you can name it, it’s riding the rails beneath the city which never sleeps. In a city where everyone is a stranger and uncomfortably crammed onto each other at every turn, a high concentration of psychopathy is to be expected, and the subway attracts it like a magnet.
One brush with psychopathy in the subway many years ago made me think of Daniel Penny and his choices on that fateful day last May. I was riding the subway in Manhattan, midweek, early afternoon, so there were few passengers on my subway car. At some stop, a guy boards the car, pushing a hand-truck, like those used to deliver beer kegs and furniture. In a car mostly empty, he singles me out and demands my seat, so flatly I tell him no. He turns around, picks up and swings the hand-truck at my head. I jumped at him, just within the hand-truck’s arc, and tackled him to the subway car’s floor, where two other passengers helped me to pin him to the ground. When the doors opened (around West 14th Street, if I remember correctly) another passenger hailed the police, who arrived and arrested the assailant. What became of him, or even who he was, I have no clue, since no official ever contacted me in follow up to my statement to police on the scene.
This long-forgotten incident leapt back to mind when I read Daniel Penny’s case. His incident could have resolved with no appreciable injuries like mine… and mine could have resolved tragically like his. Of course, this is not an apples-to-apples comparison for several factors, but there is enough similarity that had some variables been different, the outcomes may have been reversed.
The short of it is that with NYC’s population density and its dog-eats-dog dynamic, there is a lamentable concentration of people suffering mental crises, and sometimes you never know of what some stranger is capable. For some denizens in the Belly of the Beast, three hots and a cot are just what they seek; caving in your face via second degree assault is just an added bonus. The internet is awash in videos of people getting assaulted in NYC’s subway, and a disappointing characteristic of many of these videos are the people who look on agape but do nothing. Some of these straphangers may be cowed into this violence-voyeurism, but a great many of them simply have no time to get involved, much less for just another complete stranger. Criminals realize and capitalize on this, expecting that they can bully people without encountering resistance.
But one such criminal’s plans were turned upside down by Daniel Penny. Instead of shying away from involvement, Penny recognized fellowship with other New Yorkers and refused to sit by idly as they were serially victimized. In gratitude for his public service, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg prosecuted Penny to the fullest, and would you expect anything less? This is the same DA who on surveillance footage watched eldery bodega owner Jose Alba fight for his life against a robber and the robber’s girlfriend as she stabbed Alba, then thought fit to charge Alba with murder for the robber’s resultant demise. If anyone wonders why many New Yorkers idly watch as criminals prey on fellow travellers, it’s because on a stranger’s behalf, no one wants to be perp-walked and demonized in the media.
A jury of his peers reached the correct conclusion for Penny. The next person to interrupt someone’s crime spree may not be so lucky. In NYC the safer course of action is just to let the criminals cull the herd, then stretch out into the newly created legroom.
