At Daniel Penny’s Trial, the Moment May Matter as Much as the Evidence

In some ways it is easy to see how the events of May 1, 2023, could be framed to support a narrative of a city lost in fear, exhausted by a sense of chaos. That afternoon, Daniel Penny left City Tech in Downtown Brooklyn, where he was studying architecture, and headed into Manhattan via the F train to the Flatiron branch of Life Time, the elite gym and wellness merchant. A few stops in, at Second Avenue, an unhinged Jordan Neely got on and threw his jacket to the floor.

He started ranting about deprivation — about wanting ginger ale, about not caring if he ended up at Rikers, about feeling ready to die. Whether he mentioned wanting to kill anyone is unclear; witnesses offered differing accounts. But he seemed to be unarmed, directing his tirade at no one in particular.

Mr. Penny, a former Marine with a green belt from the corps’ martial arts program, looked at the frightened women and children around him and immediately sought to subdue a man they believed to be dangerous, grabbing him from behind and putting him in a chokehold. According to records from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, only 30 seconds passed between the time the train left Second Avenue and when it arrived at the next station.

At that point, everyone fearing this person who seemed so combustible could get off. Still, Mr. Penny held to the chokehold, exerting varying degrees of pressure, for nearly another five and a half minutes. Mr. Neely was pronounced dead at Lenox Hill Hospital in Greenwich Village. A medical examiner determined that he had died as a result of compression to the neck.

Last week, after three days of deliberation, the jurors weighing the charges against Mr. Penny were unable to unanimously agree on whether he was guilty of the leading one, manslaughter in the second degree. The judge then dismissed that charge and told the jurors to reconvene on Monday to deliberate on the lesser count of criminally negligent homicide.

In a strikingly convivial conversation with detectives at the Fifth Precinct on the day of the confrontation, Mr. Penny would describe the man he put in his grip as a “crackhead,” claiming that “these” were the “guys” who were “pushing people in front of trains.” However glaring the bias, the assumption was one any of us might have made. All but two of the 11 witnesses who testified at the trial said that Mr. Neely’s presence amounted to the scariest experience they’d had on a subway.