If you’ve ever wondered whether a not-guilty verdict made it all up to Daniel Penny, the man who was on trial for manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide in the death of Jordan Neely on the New York City subway, his attorney wants you to know that it was “hell” on him — and remains so.
In an appearance on Fox News last month, Thomas Kenniff, the attorney who defended the Marine Corps veteran in a Manhattan courtroom, told Jacqui Heinrich that the jury’s decision “does not relieve the trauma,” either personally or financially, for his client.
Penny was the man who restrained Neely, a mentally ill man who was screaming at passengers and threatening them on May 1, 2023. Neely ended up dying, and, even though it was clear that he was mostly the author of his own demise, he also became a cause célèbre of the left. That led to charges for Penny and a year and a half through the criminal justice system.
The fact that Neely threatened passengers with the words “I don’t have food. I don’t have a drink. I’m fed up. I don’t mind going to jail and getting life in prison. I’m ready to die,” apparently persuaded enough people on the jury that he was guilty of neither charge he was on trial for. They had initially deadlocked on the manslaughter charge on Dec. 6, at which point a judge dismissed it.
On Dec. 9, the jury returned a unanimous not-guilty verdict on the lesser charge.
Late last month, Kenniff appeared on Fox News where Heinrich asked him about “what it’s like to face the consequences of intervening” in Penny’s case.
“That’s a point I’ve made to people who’ve approached the staff for this case and who were obviously elated with the verdict,” Kenniff said. “It was the correct verdict.
“But I always try to stress upon people that it does not relieve the trauma of what it’s like for someone in my client’s position to have faced the wait of a felony prosecution and a felony indictment — the eighteen, nineteen months of uncertainty, anxiety that come with that.
“That is life-altering no matter how well the verdict comes out. Those scars don’t just heal.”
And, indeed, Penny is still facing a lawsuit from Neely’s father, something which will make the process of healing even more protracted.
This sort of thing, Kenniff said, will dissuade people from intervening in future incidents, including a woman who was set on fire on the subway just days before.
“Seeing the hell that my client went through … as events like these occur throughout the city and beyond, it’s very reasonable to expect that people will see what happened to my client and what he had to go through before he was exonerated,” Kenniff said.
Heinrich went on to note that almost a quarter of New York Police Department police officers want to leave the job as soon as possible, given the state of the job in the 2020s.
This, Kenniff said, “has been going on for quite some time.
“Did my client’s situation help the problem? Probably not, but the reality is that the radical progressive agenda, the ‘defund the police’ crowd, the radical elements of the BLM crowd … were really about demonizing police and vindicating certain criminal elements at any cost, no matter how culpable they are.”
And this is what’s so important to realize about the Daniel Penny case: He shouldn’t have been in that courtroom, period, and the fact it even got there will ensure that less good Samaritans stand up and act.
This is what the Penny case made clear: You want a Daniel Penny on your train. You don’t want people who aren’t going to get involved when they can get involved and you can’t. Penny is a former Marine, someone who knows how to restrain a man who is clearly out of his mind. But when the left demanded his hide, Manhattan Democrats complied.
Let’s hope none of them are on the train when they reap the whirlwind of the wind they’ve sowed.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
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