NEW YORK (Reuters) -A former U.S. Marine sergeant who used a chokehold to restrain Jordan Neely, a homeless man, on a New York City subway car was found not guilty of criminally negligent homicide on Monday in Neely’s death.
Daniel Penny, 26, has said he never intended to kill Neely, a 30-year-old homeless man with a history of mental illness, during their encounter on an uptown train on May 1, 2023.
A judge had dismissed a more serious charge, manslaughter in the second degree, against Penny after jurors emerged twice during their third day of deliberations on Friday to say they were divided on it.
Penny did not testify during the trial, which began in October.
“I’ve had enough of this; the system is rigged,” Neely’s father Andre Zachary told reporters outside the courthouse following the verdict.
Prosecutors from the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office did not dispute that Neely was loud, angry and threatening as he boarded the train, shouting that he was hungry, thirsty and wanted to be sent back to jail.
But they told jurors that Penny, who grabbed Neely from behind with an arm around Neely’s neck and brought him to the floor, used deadly physical force without justification and for far longer than necessary.
Dafna Yoran, an assistant district attorney, had said during closing arguments that Penny was warned by people around him about risks to Neely’s life and intentionally ignored them.
“He didn’t recognize that Mr. Neely, too, was a person,” she said during her closing argument on Dec. 2. “He didn’t care what happened to Mr. Neely.”
Penny continued to choke Neely on the floor of the subway car for nearly six minutes after the train pulled into the station and other passengers left the car, prosecutors said.
Penny’s defense lawyers told jurors that Penny, a student on his way to a gym, acted out of alarm that Neely might hurt a woman and a child he was approaching. Neely was unarmed.
Lawyer Steven Raiser said his client held Neely “until he knew that he was no longer a threat” but he did not apply pressure on his airway during the last crucial moments.
“What happened on May 1, 2023 was not a chokehold death,” Raiser said Monday. “He was controlling Mr. Neely’s body, not choking him.”
Penny’s lawyer theorized that Neely died from another cause, possibly a drug overdose or a sickle cell crisis. Prosecutor Yoran rejected those scenarios, telling jurors it is extremely rare for sickle cell, a genetic blood disorder, to lead to a fatal crisis, and that it also was unlikely that Neely died from drug overdose at exactly the same moment when he was being held in a chokehold.
The killing gained widespread public attention, with some viewing Neely, who was Black, as a victim of a white vigilante. Others, including some Republican politicians, called Penny a hero.
(Reporting by Maria Tsvetkova; Additional reporting by Jonathan Allen and Andrew Hay; Editing by Donna Bryson, Jonathan Oatis and Rosalba O’Brien)
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