Decryption | Sympathy for NYC Subway Murder Accused

(New York) Despite his indictment for murder in New York, the young man became a hero in the eyes of millions of Americans.

No, it’s not Luigi Mangione, alleged assassin of the CEO of the first private health insurer in the United States. Aged 26, this son of a good family takes on the role of antihero in this drama reflecting – or revealing – a system considered violent by many Americans. A system that seems to prioritize profits over healthcare.

It’s about Daniel Penny. Last Monday, this ex-Marine, also aged 26, was acquitted of criminally negligent homicide in connection with the strangulation death of Jordan Neely, a 30-year-old homeless man, on the New York subway on 1^is May 2023. Three days earlier, the judge at his trial had quashed the most serious charge against him – manslaughter – after the jury’s repeated failures to reach a unanimous verdict on this offense.

His acquittal – and the public’s reaction to it – is as revealing of a disturbing reality as the crime attributed to Luigi Mangione.

On the day of the verdict, leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement cried racism. They stood outside the courthouse where the trial of Penny, a white man accused of killing a mentally ill black man by holding him to the ground for six minutes in a chokehold, had just concluded.

“In today’s America, no white person will be convicted of killing a black person,” Chivona Newsome said, addressing a handful of protesters.

His brother, Hank Newsome, added: “Today, white supremacy won another victory. »

A city councilor denounced the “lynching” of Jordan Neely, whose best years were spent imitating Michael Jackson in the streets and subways of New York.

But racism is not the only prism through which this drama has been analyzed, far from it. Coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic, New Yorkers faced a series of gratuitous attacks on their subways calling into question the ability of city officials to deal with crime and mental health issues.

Michelle Go, an employee of the consulting company Deloitte, was the first victim of this wave of violence, in January 2022. She died at the age of 40 after being pushed onto the tracks by an individual suffering from psychosis for a few seconds before the arrival of a train.

From then until mid-October of the following year, 37 other people were pushed onto the New York subway tracks, attacks that made the front pages of the city’s tabloids and fueled a climate of fear . To these cases were added a number of other destabilizing incidents which have not all been officially recorded.

It was in this context that Jordan Neely boarded an F train on 1^is May 2023. According to witnesses, he strode across the wagon, throwing his jacket on the ground and screaming that he was hungry, that he wanted to go back to prison and that he didn’t care if he lived or died.

He did not touch any passengers. But Daniel Penny, who was on his way to his Manhattan gym after an architecture class in Brooklyn, intervened to stop him. Thirty seconds later, the train stopped at the next station, allowing passengers who wished to exit. But Penny didn’t let go for the next 5 minutes and 30 seconds, a video confirmed.

The ex-Marine said he intervened to protect the passengers.

The Manhattan prosecutor’s representative did not question his intentions, but she criticized him for “using too much force for too long.”

“He went way too far,” Dafna Yoran said during closing arguments, warning jury members against seeing Penny’s trial as “a referendum on our society’s inability to treat mental illness.” and the homeless in the metro” or on the work of the police.

Made up of seven women and five men, the jury may have chosen to ignore this warning after hearing nine of the eleven witnesses at the scene admit that Neely gave them their “scariest” experience on the subway from New York. At the time of the tragedy, they did not yet know that Neely was part of the ” top 50 », a list maintained by the City of homeless people considered to be most in need of help and treatment.

One of the witnesses thanked Penny. His admirers on the right and other factions believe he should never have been charged.

“Daniel is a good guy, and the New York DA tried to ruin his life because he had a backbone,” Vice President-elect JD Vance wrote on X last Friday, inviting Penny to attend with him and Donald Trump at the Army-Navy football game, held the next day.

Daniel Penny’s acquittal reminded older New Yorkers of Bernhard Goetz’s acquittal on charges of attempted murder, assault and endangering others. Nicknamed the “metro vigilante”, this white man, then aged 37, shot and wounded four young black people whom he suspected of wanting to rob him in a metro car, 40 years ago on Friday.

Denunciations of racism followed Goetz’s acquittal on the most serious charges against him. However, according to a survey published at the time by the New York Timesmore than half of New Yorkers approved his gesture, a reaction attributed to their fed up with “muggings”, these attacks which can occur in the street, the subway or the vestibule of an apartment.

Columnist Jimmy Breslin, who always had his finger on the pulse of the population, explained this disturbing sympathy for Goetz by using a phrase that perhaps applies to Penny today: “He seems to be a hero at a time when the city has none. »