By Chris Menahan – Information Liberation
Daniel Penny on Monday was found not guilty of criminally negligent homicide in the death of Jordan Neely and is now a free man.
Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Dafna Yoran’s gambit to avoid a mistrial by dropping a manslaughter charge against Penny in a bid to secure a conviction on the lesser charge of criminally negligent homicide failed.
Had she stuck with the manslaughter charge and allowed a mistrial to be declared, District Attorney Alvin Bragg could have tried him again in a second trial and with a biased jury potentially secured a conviction.
From NBC News, “Daniel Penny found not guilty in chokehold death of Jordan Neely”:
Daniel Penny was acquitted Monday of criminally negligent homicide in the chokehold death of Jordan Neely, a 30-year-old homeless man with a history of mental illness whose final moments on a New York City subway train were captured on bystander video that set off weeks of protests and drew national attention.
The decision, on the fifth day of deliberations, came after the jury deadlocked Friday on the more serious charge of manslaughter, leading the judge to dismiss it. Penny faced up to four years in prison.
As the jury foreperson read the “not guilty” verdict, some observers in the courtroom applauded. Others began to audibly sob and yell, including Neely’s father, Andre Zachery, who was escorted out.
“This is America. That is the sound of Black pain,” one person said outside of the courtroom in Lower Manhattan to the reaction.
Chants of “no justice, no peace,” could be heard echoing from outside.
A Black Lives Matter activist outside the court called for “black vigilante” retaliation in response to the verdict (NBC didn’t mention that in their report highlighting “Black pain”):
That said, had this case taken place at the height of the Black Lives Matter hysteria, there’s no question Penny would have been found guilty as happened with Ian Cranston, Derek Chauvin, the McMichaels, Jonathan Pentland and others.
All these people were found guilty not off the facts of the case but off on the fact of their race. If their trials were taking place today, odds are they would all be acquitted. They must not be forced to rot in prison just because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Chauvin was nearly stabbed to death in prison last year on Black Friday by former Mexican Mafia FBI snitch John Turscak in an attack he said was “symbolic with the Black Lives Matter movement and the ‘Black Hand symbol’ associated with the Mexican Mafia criminal organization.”
Everyone now fears that this is the fate they’ll face if they step up as Daniel Penny did to protect themselves and others against a designated victim.
The notion that you will be thrown in prison for trying to stop a career criminal on a rampage just because your race is viewed as an “oppressor” and theirs as a “victim” needs to be completely destroyed if we’re to return to sanity.