The Patriot Post® · Daniel Penny Defends Himself Again

Now that the racial demagogues have had their say, Daniel Penny figured it was time for him to tell his side of the story. And tell it he did.

Recall that Penny is the 24-year-old Marine Corps veteran and resident of Manhattan’s East Village who protected himself and his fellow New York City subway passengers by putting Jordan Neely, a deranged, homeless, and historically violent fellow passenger, in a carotid restraint that resulted in Neely’s death.

“The consequences of manslaughter two is five to 15 years,” said Lennon Edwards, an attorney for Neely’s family. “Ask yourself: ‘Is that enough?’ Murder two, up to 25 to life. So, we need a full cup of justice here.”

A full cup of justice, eh? In a just world, Daniel Penny would be lauded by law enforcement and presented with a citizenship award. But there’s nothing just about District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s New York City, where men of action and good Samaritans are charged with serious crimes for defending themselves and their fellow citizens.

On Sunday, Penny’s lawyers released a video interview in which their client compellingly denies, for one, that he held Neely in a “chokehold” for 15 minutes and said he had no intention of killing him.

“The man came on, stumbled on,” said Penny. “He appeared to be on drugs. The doors closed, and he ripped his jacket off and threw it down at the people sitting down my left.”

Penny continued: “I was listening to music at the time, and he was yelling, so I took my headphones out to hear what he was yelling. And the three main threats that he repeated over and over was, ‘I’m going to kill you,’ ‘I’m prepared to go to jail for life,’ and ‘I’m willing to die.’ You know, this was a scary situation. Mr. Neely came on. He was threatening. I’m six-two, and he was taller than me. There’s a common misconception that Marines don’t get scared. We’re actually taught, one of our core values is courage, and courage is not the absence of fear but how you handle fear. … I was scared for myself, but I looked around, I saw women and children, he was yelling in their faces, saying these threats. I just couldn’t sit still.”

Penny then pushed back against the charge that he’d applied the carotid restraint for 15 minutes: “This is not true. I mean, between stops is only a couple of minutes. So the whole interaction lasted less than 5 minutes. Some people say I was trying to choke him to death — which is also not true. I was trying to restrain him. You can see in the video there’s a clear rise and fall of his chest, indicating that he’s breathing. … And then some people say that this was about race, which is absolutely ridiculous. I didn’t see a black man threatening passengers, I saw a man threatening passengers, a lot of whom were people of color.”

In fact, one of the men who helped Penny restrain Neely was black. “I’m not a white supremacist,” said Penny. And it’s a sad sign of the times that such a thing even needed to be said.

Nonetheless, Penny, who was called “a hero” by at least one of his fellow passengers — a passenger who happens to be a woman of color — is being forced to fight for his freedom. But Penny is not without his defenders. One of them, Kid Rock, has reportedly become one of the top donors to his legal defense fund.

Here, we might remember what Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez disgracefully blurted out via Twitter shortly after the incident: “Jordan Neely was murdered. But [because] Jordan was houseless and crying for food in a time when the city is raising rents and stripping services to militarize itself while many in power demonize the poor, the murderer gets protected [with] passive headlines + no charges. It’s disgusting.”

What’s disgusting, of course, is behavior like that of AOC and others who refuse to acknowledge that we are innocent until proven guilty in this country, and that the right to defend oneself is the first civil right. Indeed, without this fundamental right, all other rights lose much of their meaning.

Moreover, we have one question for AOC: Whose party controls New York?

The leftist Mob, if it doesn’t get its way in court, will attempt to turn this unfortunate incident into George Floyd 2.0. And if we allow that to happen, shame on us.

In the meantime, everyone who cares about this case — and cares about justice — should listen to Daniel Penny in his own words.