Now that Daniel Penny has been acquitted of the absurd homicide charges against him, perhaps New York City and State officials can be put on trial. They are responsible not only for the death of Jordan Neely, the drug-addicted schizophrenic whom Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg accused Penny of recklessly killing, but for the assaults […]
Now that Daniel Penny has been acquitted of the absurd homicide charges against him, perhaps New York City and State officials can be put on trial. They are responsible not only for the death of Jordan Neely, the drug-addicted schizophrenic whom Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg accused Penny of recklessly killing, but for the assaults on and killings of hundreds of New Yorkers by mentally ill vagrants whom politicians allow to roam the streets. Yet according to Bragg and his office, it was Penny who needed to be imprisoned, for the safety of city residents, for having protected his fellow citizens from a potential murderer.
For now, the heroic male virtues of chivalry, self-reliance, and initiative have been vindicated, in the face of government’s effort to snuff those values out. How much longer those traits will survive under elite pressure remains to be seen. New York officials should take the Penny acquittal as a wakeup call, however. Their authority may be slipping away, a development adumbrated by last month’s national election results.
The Daniel Penny homicide trial was a travesty of justice. On May 1, 2023, a psychotic, wildly gesticulating vagrant burst into a New York subway car as it travelled beneath Manhattan’s SoHo district. The new arrival, Jordan Neely, started screaming that he wanted to return to jail and was ready to die. Some eyewitnesses recalled that the 30-year-old Neely threatened to kill the straphangers.
The passengers were terrified, and rightly so. New York’s seriously mentally ill residents are time bombs who regularly explode. They push subway riders in front of moving trains; above ground, they club, shoot, and stab their victims. Three weeks after the May 1, 2023, subway incident, another street denizen slammed a woman’s head into a subway car, paralyzing her for life. This November 18, a 51-year-old vagrant with the inevitable long rap sheet and seeming immunity from extended incarceration went on a stabbing rampage throughout Manhattan, slashing to death a 36-year-old construction worker, a 67-year-old man fishing in the East River, and a 36-year-old woman sitting on a park bench. As recently as December 1, a screaming female pushed a 43-year-old man onto the subway tracks in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. She has not been apprehended, but it is a virtual certainty that she, too, has had numerous run-ins with outreach workers and the police that resulted in no long-term confinement.
Americans who have never ridden a subway can only imagine the fear that grips someone sealed underground when a deeply disturbed person starts to act out. The near-universal reaction is to put one’s head down, avoid eye contact, and rush out of the car when it pulls into the next station. But on May 1, 2023, something archaic occurred: a passenger put his own well-being at risk to protect his fellow riders. Daniel Penny, now 26, stepped up to the screaming Neely, wrapped his arms around him, and took him to the subway floor, with Neely’s body on top of his, until help could arrive at the next station. Neely, who was high on a large dose of synthetic marijuana, subsequently died. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg—he who seeks not to “destroy lives through unnecessary incarceration”—charged Penny with second degree manslaughter—i.e., with recklessly causing the death of another person—and with criminally negligent homicide.
The Penny proceeding was more than a travesty of justice, however. It exemplified two intertwined traits of our time: government’s abandonment of law-abiding citizens in favor of the dysfunctional and antisocial, and the hatred of values associated with white males and the Western civilization that they created.
The Penny-Neely incident was racialized from the onset. News coverage invariably led with Penny’s whiteness and Neely’s blackness. (By contrast, black-on-white attacks are presented in a colorblind fashion on those rare occasions when the media report on them at all. Blacks commit 76 percent of all non-lethal interracial violence between blacks and whites despite being just a fifth of the white population.) New York’s leading race-baiters—Public Advocate Jumaane Williams and Al Sharpton—demanded that Penny be prosecuted.
