A month after lawyers began laying out their case in Daniel Penny’s trial, they are set to make their final arguments on Monday to the jury that will decide his fate.
Mr. Penny, a former Marine and Long Island native, was charged with manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide after he put Jordan Neely in a chokehold for about six minutes in a subway car last year, killing him, prosecutors said.
Mr. Neely, 30, who was homeless and had struggled with his mental health for years, boarded an uptown F train on the afternoon of May 1, 2023, and began yelling, throwing his jacket on the floor and striding through the subway car, according to witnesses. As he approached other riders, he screamed that he was hungry, that he wanted to return to jail and that he did not care if he lived or died, they said.
Lawyers for Mr. Penny, 26, told the jury that their client had stepped in to restrain Mr. Neely, concerned that he would hurt other passengers.
In making their case, prosecutors with the Manhattan district attorney’s office did not contest the likely motivation behind Mr. Penny’s actions. His initial efforts to restrain Mr. Neely may have been “even laudable,” said Dafna Yoran, an assistant district attorney.
“But under the law, deadly physical force such as a chokehold is permitted only when it is absolutely necessary, and only for as long as it is absolutely necessary,” she said during opening statements. “And here, the defendant went way too far.”
It was that assertion — that Mr. Penny’s chokehold lasted too long, beyond when the train had stopped and let passengers out of the car — that became the cornerstone of the prosecution’s case. Mr. Penny’s prolonged choking of Mr. Neely after he was no longer an imminent threat is what made his actions criminal, prosecutors said.
Calling more than 30 witnesses, prosecutors tried to shift the jurors’ focus away from the fear that riders felt while the train traveled between stops, to the moments after it had stopped at the Broadway-Lafayette Street station. Mr. Penny, a former Marine trained to use chokeholds, should have known that he was at risk of killing Mr. Neely, they argued, noting that even when people tried to warn him or to help restrain Mr. Neely, Mr. Penny did not let go.
Mr. Penny’s lawyers argued that Mr. Neely’s death was not caused by the chokehold and that it was impossible to know how much pressure Mr. Penny was exerting. The defense said that Mr. Neely’s schizophrenia, synthetic marijuana use and sickle cell trait had led to his death.
The medical examiner, Dr. Cynthia Harris, determined that Mr. Neely died from “compression of the neck.” Throughout her testimony in the trial, she maintained that the other possible factors suggested by the defense were not the cause.
A forensic pathologist hired by Mr. Penny’s legal team, Dr. Satish Chundru, argued that Mr. Penny had struggled with Mr. Neely but had not choked him to death.
Rebutting the medical examiner’s findings, he listed a possible fatal combination: “sickle cell crisis, the schizophrenia, the struggle and restraint and the synthetic marijuana.”
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