Now that Daniel Penny has been acquitted of the absurd homicide charges against him, perhaps New York City and State officials can be put on trial. They are responsible not only for the death of Jordan Neely, the drug-addicted schizophrenic whom Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg accused Penny of recklessly killing, but for the assaults on and killings of hundreds of New Yorkers by mentally ill vagrants whom politicians allow to roam the streets. Yet according to Bragg and his office, it was Penny who needed to be imprisoned, for the safety of city residents, for having protected his fellow citizens from a potential murderer.
For now, the heroic male virtues of chivalry, self-reliance, and initiative have been vindicated, in the face of government’s effort to snuff those values out. How much longer those traits will survive under elite pressure remains to be seen. New York officials should take the Penny acquittal as a wakeup call, however. Their authority may be slipping away, a development adumbrated by last month’s national election results.
The Daniel Penny homicide trial was a travesty of justice. On May 1, 2023, a psychotic, wildly gesticulating vagrant burst into a New York subway car as it travelled beneath Manhattan’s SoHo district. The new arrival, Jordan Neely, started screaming that he wanted to return to jail and was ready to die. Some eyewitnesses recalled that the 30-year-old Neely threatened to kill the straphangers.
The passengers were terrified, and rightly so. New York’s seriously mentally ill residents are time bombs who regularly explode. They push subway riders in front of moving trains; above ground, they club, shoot, and stab their victims. Three weeks after the May 1, 2023, subway incident, another street denizen slammed a woman’s head into a subway car, paralyzing her for life. This November 18, a 51-year-old vagrant with the inevitable long rap sheet and seeming immunity from extended incarceration went on a stabbing rampage throughout Manhattan, slashing to death a 36-year-old construction worker, a 67-year-old man fishing in the East River, and a 36-year-old woman sitting on a park bench. As recently as December 1, a screaming female pushed a 43-year-old man onto the subway tracks in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. She has not been apprehended, but it is a virtual certainty that she, too, has had numerous run-ins with outreach workers and the police that resulted in no long-term confinement.
Americans who have never ridden a subway can only imagine the fear that grips someone sealed underground when a deeply disturbed person starts to act out. The near-universal reaction is to put one’s head down, avoid eye contact, and rush out of the car when it pulls into the next station. But on May 1, 2023, something archaic occurred: a passenger put his own well-being at risk to protect his fellow riders. Daniel Penny, now 26, stepped up to the screaming Neely, wrapped his arms around him, and took him to the subway floor, with Neely’s body on top of his, until help could arrive at the next station. Neely, who was high on a large dose of synthetic marijuana, subsequently died. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg—he who seeks not to “destroy lives through unnecessary incarceration”—charged Penny with second degree manslaughter—i.e., with recklessly causing the death of another person—and with criminally negligent homicide.
The Penny proceeding was more than a travesty of justice, however. It exemplified two intertwined traits of our time: government’s abandonment of law-abiding citizens in favor of the dysfunctional and antisocial, and the hatred of values associated with white males and the Western civilization that they created.
The Penny-Neely incident was racialized from the onset. News coverage invariably led with Penny’s whiteness and Neely’s blackness. (By contrast, black-on-white attacks are presented in a colorblind fashion on those rare occasions when the media report on them at all. Blacks commit 76 percent of all non-lethal interracial violence between blacks and whites despite being just a fifth of the white population.) New York’s leading race-baiters—Public Advocate Jumaane Williams and Al Sharpton—demanded that Penny be prosecuted. The city comptroller called Penny a “vigilante.” Yusef Salaam, one of five delinquents accused of assaulting and raping a jogger during a nocturnal reign of terror in New York’s Central Park in 1989 and who is now an up-and-coming politician, announced at Neely’s funeral that the incident was “a lynching in the public square, a lynching of a Black man who was never given a chance by the system that was designed to keep him oppressed.” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said that Neely had been “murdered.” New York mayor Eric Adams noted that his son was also named Jordan and that Neely was “black like me.” “No family should have to suffer a loss like this,” Adams added. “And too many black and brown families bear the brunt of a system long overdue for reform.” (Adams subsequently denounced the Penny prosecution.)
During the Penny trial, members of Black Lives Matter and of the National Action Network (Sharpton’s race-hustling organization) shouted that Penny was a “murderer” and “subway strangler” as the defendant entered the courthouse in the mornings. On December 6, NBC News Now declared that the Penny-Neely incident has come to stand for “racial injustice.” (Initial news coverage also invariably described Neely as a “former Michael Jackson imitator and subway performer,” as if such subway “performances” in the middle of moving crowded cars are moments of gaiety and entertainment, not of implicit threat and extortion.)
Penny was worse than white, however. He was the nightmare of every Women’s Studies major: a blond, tall, former Marine. If Hollywood still made traditional Westerns, Penny would be the sheriff that introduces order to the wild frontier. Penny was not defending himself; he was defending those weaker than himself. Such self-sacrifice is the essence of male chivalry, which must be eradicated to pave the way for the nanny state’s monopoly on human action.
The prosecution argued that Penny should have known that his chokehold was allegedly going on too long and that it could result in Neely’s alleged asphyxiation. Penny recklessly disregarded the risk of death, according to the initial manslaughter count of the indictment. The jury deadlocked on the manslaughter charge, which the judge threw out on Friday, December 6, leaving the jurors to move on to the negligent homicide charge. The prosecution’s analysis remained the same, however: while Penny might have initially been justified in taking Neely down, according to the prosecutors, once the subway train arrived at the next station and the other passengers were able to stream out, there was no longer a need to restrain Neely since ostensibly he could no longer pose a risk to others. Penny should have been carefully monitoring Neely’s vital signs, despite the chaos and stress of the moment. The defense countered that Penny was not applying undue pressure to Neely’s neck or chest, that Penny was justified in holding Neely down until the police arrived, and that the chokehold did not cause Neely’s death. Penny didn’t even know that Neely had died until told by NYPD detectives during his voluntary interview with them after the incident.
If one follows the prosecution’s logic, New York’s government should have stood trial. If Penny was reckless regarding the risk that his restraint of Neely would allegedly cause Neely’s death, the state and city have been worse than reckless in their disregard for citizen safety. It is not just a possibility or probability that in the near future, another mentally ill drug addict will assault an innocent civilian—it is a certainty. Calculating that risk is far easier than the second-by-second reevaluation of harm that Penny supposedly should have performed regarding a thrashing Neely. Every day that New York officials fail to torpedo the status quo regarding street vagrancy is a day that they are abandoning their responsibility to protect life and civil order. If Neely had not killed anyone by May 2023, it was not for lack of trying. In 2019, Neely punched Filemon Castillo Baltazar in the head as the 65-year-old waited for a subway in Greenwich Village. In June 2021, he walloped Anne Mitcheltree in the head inside a deli in the East Village; she was in her late sixties. In November 2021, Neely broke the nose and fractured the eye socket of a 67-year-old woman as she exited a subway on the Lower East Side.
When he was not assaulting the elderly, he was terrifying other New Yorkers. In June 2019, Neely banged on the door of a subway ticket agent’s booth and threatened to kill her. Yet Neely was still allowed his freedom.
The homeless lobby regularly intones that the mentally ill are no more likely to be violent than the sane. That claim ignores the fact that the drug-abusing mentally ill, which category encompasses virtually all of the madmen roaming America’s city streets, are far more likely to be violent. Even Neely’s heavy use of the synthetic marijuana K-2, however, was not enough to get him permanently locked up. K-2 is even more likely to trigger violent outbreaks than other illegal drugs, due to its strength and powerful psychological effects. No matter. Neely’s 42 arrests resulted in brief jail stints, at best, and Neely’s hundreds of encounters with outreach workers always left him free to return to the streets, even though he was on the city’s Top 50 list of most intractable vagrants.
Why have governments opted to protect the purported rights of mentally ill drug addicts rather than to protect the rights of peaceful citizens to be free from threat? In part, we live with the legacy of the radical libertarian Thomas Szasz, who claimed that mental illness was a construct slapped on nonconformists by an uptight establishment. Szasz’s critique made it much harder to confine the mentally ill against their consent, even if the mentally ill are incapable of rationally assessing their capacity to live outside a mental institution. Race plays a role, too, since the schizophrenic population is disproportionately black. Confining the drug-addicted schizophrenic population will thus result in a disparate impact on black schizophrenics. Disparate impact is viewed as per se proof of racism by today’s elites.
But a final factor is the government’s abandonment of the law-abiding and hardworking in favor of the welfare-dependent, anti-social, and criminal classes. This shift has been pushed along by an ever growing cadre of nonprofit groups that set themselves up as advocates for the marginalized, without ever signing a contract with their clients or receiving a popular mandate. Homeless advocacy groups have a financial interest in keeping vagrants in plain view. How else will those groups fundraise and rake in million-dollar government contracts to perform feckless “outreach” work? So the homeless organizations fight every effort to compel vagrants into treatment and off the streets, even though such compulsion would be in the best interests of the advocates’ “clients.”
Just because the massive NGO sector demands policies that destroy safety and order does not mean that governments have to accede. Governments do accede, however, because the membrane between the NGO world and the public sector is porous. And public officials have simply lost interest in ordinary taxpayers. It is more exciting to fight for the rights of the apparently downtrodden. Doing so means treating non-welfare-consuming citizens simply as ATMs for officials’ pet redistribution projects. Any of New York’s recent string of homeless assaults should have resulted in New York officials dropping everything else in order to prevent any recurrence. Those officials should have done whatever it takes to guarantee public safety—including challenging judicial rulings that prioritize the so-called interests of the homeless (read: of their self-appointed advocates) over the interests of the housed and the law-abiding. But such single-minded focus on government’s core duty never occurred. Instead, city and state representatives went back to worrying about migrants, Donald Trump, trans rights, abortion, climate change, welfare, and subsidized housing.
Jordan Neelys are still roaming New York streets because protecting their autonomy is government’s paramount concern. Never mind that the autonomy of the law-abiding is proportionally restricted. Many New Yorkers now avoid the subways, losing access to a vital public service that they are paying for, simply because government refuses to maintain order.
The Penny jury rebelled against the delinquency of government and the rule of the dysfunctional. Bragg should face a recall. For those still calling Penny a vigilante, the government brought such citizen action onto itself. Such self-action is what you get when government fails. Despite the acquittal, future potential Pennys are now on notice that they risk a homicide indictment if they guard their fellows from harm. The best solution to America’s self-willed urban chaos is to throw out current authority and start over from fundamental principles of law and order.
Photo by Andrew Lichtenstein/Getty Images