The Daniel Penny trial has exposed the moral rot of the left

On 1 May 2023, Daniel Penny, a former US Marine, was on a crowded New York City subway train when Jordan Neely, a homeless black man, began screaming.

According to witnesses, Neely said he was ‘ready to die’. The other riders were scared, describing his behaviour as ‘erratic’ and ‘insanely threatening’. When Neely allegedly shouted, ‘I’m going to kill you!’, Penny put him in a chokehold to restrain him. He claims this was an attempt to protect other passengers. The chokehold lasted for six minutes and resulted in Neely, who was reportedly high on drugs at the time, being rushed to the hospital and then declared dead.

Neely had an extensive criminal record. He had been arrested dozens of times, including for theft, petty larceny, unprovoked assaults and, most recently, for punching a 67-year-old woman.

Penny is currently waiting to find out whether he has been convicted of criminally negligent homicide, which carries a maximum sentence of four years in prison. Last week, a judge dismissed a more serious charge of second-degree murder, after the jury failed to reach a verdict.

The legal process should be allowed to run its course, but from the start there has been politically motivated interference and inconsistency. Take Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg, who reduced 60 per cent of all felony cases last year to lesser charges, yet is now accused of seeking to ‘strong arm’ the jury by trying Penny for two charges, in an effort to secure his conviction. Or take the prosecutor, Dafna Yoran, who is currently throwing the book at Daniel Penny. According to Fox News, she once ‘sought reduced punishment for a Manhattan mugger who killed an 87-year-old over $300 in 2019 under the concept of “restorative justice”’.

Beyond the legal specifics, it’s the response in woke quarters that is arguably most alarming. In my view, the immediate and consistent efforts to portray Penny as a racist murderer, and to excuse and deflect focus away from Neely’s conduct, might be the most egregious example of the moral inversion that characterises so much of modern progressivism, and which the silent majority rightly detests.

Where better to start than with Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Within days of the incident, this doyenne of the left, without waiting for the full facts to emerge, let alone for the jury to deliberate, posted on X that ‘Jordan Neely was murdered’. So much for due process. Later that week, in an interview with the Cut, she claimed that Penny was ‘killed by the demonising of the poor’. Of course, the ‘poor’ people I know don’t generally assault pensioners or run around threatening commuters for no reason. It’s almost as if they’re rational human beings with agency, not feckless droids whose every fault can be blamed on someone else.

In the immediate wake of Neely’s killing, liberal outlets released think-pieces proclaiming that he was ‘killed for the crime of being hungry and unhoused’. Protesters placed posters over the adverts on the NYC subway, declaring ‘a man was lynched here’. BLM activists have called Neely’s killing an example of ‘white supremacy’. All without any evidence, before the jury has reached a verdict, and despite the fact that black people on the train who witnessed events referred to Penny as a ‘hero’.

Compare and contrast this with the response in far-left quarters to the case of Ramon Rivera. A few weeks ago, Rivera, another mentally ill homeless man, stabbed three people to death in New York. A month before that, he had been let loose on the streets under a progressive-endorsed early-release scheme. There was no outrage at the killings, no fury, no demands for policy change from the woke. Yet when a citizen took action to protect others from a mentally ill homeless man with a criminal record, and whom bystanders claim was acting in an intimidating manner, so-called progressives were up in arms about it.

The Daniel Penny / Jordan Neely case has a significance that extends beyond the outcome of the trial itself. It speaks to a sickness in parts of the left-liberal psyche. To sympathise more with the convicted criminal threatening to kill other people than with a man who put his own safety at risk to protect his fellow citizens requires an ideologically distorted view of right and wrong. It rests on the flipping of values that, across time and across societies throughout history, have been near constant. Most people find this hard to fathom, or stomach.

Worst of all, all this was entirely predictable. As soon as the story broke, we all knew that moral entrepreneurs on the left would use Neely’s death to try to whip up racial grievances. We knew that the same activists who claim to want ‘justice reform’, and who routinely seek reduced sentences for violent killers, would now demand the harshest sentence possible for Penny. We knew that parts of the media would paint the man who was restrained as a poor, unfortunate soul and probable victim of racism, and would seek to avoid any frank discussion of his appalling behaviour.

The woke’s cynicism, hypocrisy and dogmatic commitment to ideology over basic decency – the worst aspects of progressive cultism, in other words – have all been on display in this single tragic story.

Max Klinger is a lawyer and political analyst. Find him on Substack here. Follow him on X: @MaxE2review.