This Wednesday, former US Marine Daniel Penny, accused of killing a homeless man, Jordan Neely pleaded not guilty to involuntary manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide for the murder inside an F train of the New York subway, on January 1. May.
According to his statements, during the trial he was not trying to strangle the victim to death when he took action after the subject threatened the passengers in the car. The 30-year-old victim lost his life after Penny suffocated him, causing his death from neck compression.
According to multiple videos released by Penny’s legal team, the former marine denied holding Neely by the neck for 15 minutes, saying he had no intention of killing him. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said Penny was accused of holding Neely to death for several minutes “until he” stopped moving.
Penny’s attorney, Thomas Kenniff, has assured the media that he is very confident that a Manhattan jury will be able to judge this case fairly, as most jurors will have had similar experiences to what Penny observed in the subway during this incident.
In addition to that, the defendant maintains that he feared for the safety of the women and children on the New York Subway train. Prosecutors, who said Neely had been “making threats and scaring passengers” when Penny first appeared in court, though they specified in a press release that these were “verbal threats.”
The former Marine told the New York Post in an exclusive interview in May that the incident with Neely, who was black, had nothing to do with his color, saying he does not identify as a white supremacist as has been accused for the course of the trial. “Some people say I was putting up with Mr. Neely for 15 minutes. This is not true: between stops there are only a couple of minutes. So the entire interaction lasted less than 5 minutes,” Penny clarified during the trial.
Keep reading:
- Man Strangled on New York Subway: Grand Jury Indicted US Marine Daniel Penny
- Daniel Penny denies trying to kill Jordan Neely while neutralizing him on the New York subway
- Passenger fell to the rails after being stabbed in a station: violence in the New York Subway