Daniel Penny was acquitted Monday for the killing of Jordan Neely on a New York City subway.
A Manhattan jury of seven women and five men found that Penny’s actions were not criminal when he held Neely, 30-year-old a homeless man with a history of mental illness, in a chokehold on the floor of a subway car in May 2023. The chokehold lasted six minutes.
The decision came on the fifth day of deliberations after jurors spent three days deciding whether Penny, a 26-year-old former Marine, was guilty of manslaughter, CNN reported. The jury could not reach a unanimous decision, so Judge Maxwell Wiley dismissed the more serious charge.
Jurors ultimately decided that Penny was not guilty of criminally negligent homicide, which “involves causing someone's death by acting in a manner that was reckless, inattentive, or careless.”
Penny faced up to four years in prison for criminally negligent homicide and up to 15 years for manslaughter.
A witness told jurors that upon entering the subway on May 1, 2023, Neely was acting erratically and shouting about “being hungry and thirsty and said that he wanted to return to jail and didn’t care if he lived or died,” NBC news reported. Penny stepped in because he thought Neely may attack other passengers, his attorneys told jurors.
Penny’s attorneys also argued that the chokehold was not the cause of Neely’s death, despite a New York City medical examiner concluding that Neely died from compression to his neck.
Outside the courtroom, Neely's father Andre Zachary expressed his frustration and disappointment with the criminal justice system, CNN reported.
“I miss my son. My son didn’t have to go through this. I didn’t have to go through this either,” Andre Zachary told reporters. “It hurts, it really, really hurts. What are we going to do, people? What’s going to happen to us now? I’ve had enough of this. The system is rigged.”
Others have pointed to Penny's indictment as a failure to protect New York City's most vulnerable populations from harm.
"The outcome of this trial is a searing indictment of the systemic failures that continue to plague our pursuit of justice for society’s most vulnerable," New York City Council Member Yusef Salaam wrote in a statement.
