The trial of Daniel Penny, the former Marine charged in the death of a menacing homeless man aboard a New York City subway car, is on hold until after the Thanksgiving holidays, with closing arguments in the case expected when proceedings resume in Manhattan on Dec. 2.
The defense rested its case Friday without having Mr. Penny take the stand in his own manslaughter trial, as the veteran faces serious jail time for his role in the death of Jordan Neely last year after the vagrant began threatening passengers in a crowded subway car.
Defense attorneys said they opted against having Mr. Penny, 26, testify because jurors already had heard from their client in the videotaped police interrogations conducted shortly after the deadly encounter with the 30-year-old Neely.
“The jury did get to hear from our client. And they got to hear from him not only in the immediate aftermath of this incident, but a couple of hours later, before there were lawyers involved on either side,” defense attorney Thomas Kenniff said about the interrogation video played in court. “And he had an opportunity to explain himself and explain what he did, why he acted, how he acted, what he perceived. And so much of it is consistent with not only the evidence in the case, but the testimony in the case.”
Clips of the interrogation show Mr. Penny talking about how he was not trying to injure Neely, but restrain the homeless man who launched into a manic rant about being hungry and willing to spend the rest of his life in prison.
Some passengers aboard the F train testified that Neely’s behavior was “satanic” and “scared the living daylights” out of them. Others said they were not frightened by Neely, and a man who helped Mr. Penny restrain Neely testified that he thought the former Marine held the chokehold for too long.
The case has captured national attention as Mr. Penny is portrayed either as a good Samaritan who confronted a dangerous man during an erratic episode, or as a racist vigilante who took the law into his own hands. Mr. Penny is White, and Neely was Black.
The nearly six-minute chokehold Mr. Penny kept Neely in — and which was pegged as the sole cause of the vagrant’s death by a New York City medical examiner — was countered by testimony from a forensic pathologist called by the defense.
Dr. Satish Chundru, who does private autopsies for multiple counties in Texas, testified that Neely died from a combination of the synthetic cannabinoid K2 already in his system, complications stemming from his schizophrenia and sickle cell trait, and the struggle from being in Mr. Penny’s restraint.
That opinion cut against the findings of Dr. Cynthia Harris, the medical examiner who conducted Neely’s autopsy in May 2023.
Ms. Harris said “there are no alternative reasonable explanations for Mr. Neely’s death” when she testified that the homeless man died from compression of the neck due to Mr. Penny’s chokehold.
She added that police detecting a faint pulse in Neely at the scene does not discount that he was “brain dead” before his heart stopped beating.
Ms. Harris made her ruling, in part, by watching a video of the chokehold. She also did so before receiving a toxicology report on Neely, though the medical examiner said at trial that the chokehold would have killed Neely even if he had “enough fentanyl in his system to put down an elephant.”
If found guilty, Mr. Penny could spend up to 15 years in prison.
• Matt Delaney can be reached at mdelaney@washingtontimes.com.
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