Daniel Penny’s Lawyers Will Ask to Block Video in N.Y.C. Subway Chokehold Case

In an interview room in the Police Department’s Fifth Precinct last year, two detectives interviewed Daniel Penny two hours after he had choked a homeless man to death in a subway car.

In a video of the interview shown in a Manhattan courtroom on Thursday, Mr. Penny told the detectives he stepped in on May 1, 2023, because he felt the homeless man, Jordan Neely, was acting erratically and “was absolutely killing someone” that day.

On the day of his death, Mr. Neely had boarded a northbound train at the Second Avenue station and immediately had begun to scream, witnesses said.

Mr. Penny, who faces charges of manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide, told the investigators that he had taken Mr. Neely to the ground. Each time he felt a “burst of energy,” he held Mr. Neely more steadily, he said, and continued until two men helped pin Mr. Neely down.

“As soon as those guys came in and held him, I let go,” Mr. Penny told the detectives, throwing up his hands and leaning back in his chair.

But a four-minute video made by bystanders from the scene on an F train in Manhattan shows that Mr. Penny in fact continued to hold on. The video shows Mr. Penny with his arms around Mr. Neely’s neck and his legs wrapped around his body. Mr. Neely struggled against Mr. Penny’s restraint as the other men stepped in. They held on until 50 seconds after Mr. Neely became motionless.