On Monday, Daniel Penny, a 26-year-old white man, was acquitted of all charges related to the 1 May 2023 killing of Jordan Neely, a 30-year-old unhoused Black man with severe mental illness, on a New York City subway train. Penny was charged with second-degree manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide after he choked Neely for nearly six minutes, causing his death. The Marine veteran claimed self-defense after an unarmed Neely made threats to passengers and complained of being hungry and thirsty, according to witness testimony.
In a police interview following Neely’s death, Penny referred to Neely as “just a crackhead” who was “acting like a lunatic”. Experts say Penny’s acquittal fits into a longstanding pattern of how white vigilante crime is treated in the US, with white killers celebrated and Black victims denigrated.
“In situations where people of color have tried to defend themselves, it’s a whole different result,” said Mark Brodin, a professor of law at Boston College Law School. “It’s as transparent a double standard as you can ever imagine. And race is the only explanation. Class enters into it with Mr Neely, his mental problems entered into it. But race is at the top of the pyramid.”
Despite widespread outrage about Neely’s killing in New York City, Penny received an onslaught of support from those on the far right after his arrest. A crowdfunding campaign for Penny’s legal fund amassed more than $2.9m in the months after the incident. (Neely’s burial funds, on the other hand, raised just $150,094.) The Fox News host Greg Gutfeld called Neely a “violent mess” who was “better at impersonating Michael Meyers than Michael Jackson”, referring to Neely’s previous impersonations of the pop star. And another Fox News pundit, Kayleigh McEnany, laughed alongside her colleagues at protesters who gathered to condemn Neely’s killing.
Following his acquittal, Penny has been praised by conservatives, including Florida governor Ron DeSantis, Ben Shapiro and Meghan McCain, who called those critical of Penny “lunatics”.
Such commentary is part of an “unfortunate spiral” where news outlets, platforms, and people “demonize individuals for existing”, said the NAACP president Derrick Johnson. “The fact that [Penny] called this individual [a] crackhead shows his state of mind. He didn’t see this person as someone who was human [or who] more or less had the right to live.”
Brodin said that Penny’s acquittal was virtually certain, given the “history of the legal system sending these people out the back door at the courthouse. You can set your watch to it,” he said of cases in which white vigilantes claimed self-defense. “There’s just no accountability with these people.”
For example, George Zimmerman, who shot and killed Trayvon Martin, an unarmed Black teenager, in Florida in 2012, Kyle Rittenhouse, who killed two men and injured a third during a Black Lives Matters protest in Wisconsin in 2020, and Bernhard Goetz, who shot four Black teenagers on the New York City subway in 1984, were all acquitted. Vigilantes like Penny are also generally portrayed and celebrated as “heroes”, Brodin added. Goetz was hailed as the “subway savior” by New York tabloids. And Rittenhouse received messages of support and fundraisers following his arrest for first degree intentional homicide. (Rittenhouse’s victims were all white, but the protest he traveled to was against the police shooting of Jacob Blake, a Black man. Rittenhouse’s defense team said that he traveled across state lines to the demonstration to “help people”.)
Acquittal of white vigilantes takes place for several reasons, said Brodin. For one, standards of self-defense are based on a perpetrator’s testimony that they believed they were in danger, with the burden of proof in a criminal case high and jurors being “vulnerable to fear mongering by the defense lawyers”.
“It’s supposed to be a ‘reasonable fear’, but jurors don’t hear the ‘reasonable’ part of it,” said Brodin. “They think, ‘That could’ve been me on that subway. I’m glad he choked that man to death after six minutes of strangling him.”
Defense lawyers representing vigilantes often “play on the fears of jurors”, Brodin added. In the case of Zimmerman, his defense team included the testimony of Olivia Bertalan, a young white mother who said she lived in the same gated community as Zimmerman and had been the victim of a robbery.
“It had nothing to do with [Martin], but she was portrayed by defense counsel as cowering in her bedroom closet when she heard the burglars go next door,” Brodin said. “It was [an] all female jury [who] were obviously putting themselves in the situation of cowering in their own bedrooms.”
What’s more, Penny’s acquittal could have far-reaching consequences for unhoused people, a demographic that already faces increased risks of violence, said Dave Giffen, the executive director at the New York-based Coalition for the Homeless. “The fear is that we’re sending a message that citizens should be taking these situations into their own hands, that it’s okay to attack and even kill somebody that you’re afraid of.”
A potential increase in violence against the unhoused could also take place given that homeless people are unfairly blamed for perceived increases in crime, Giffen said, noting that incidents of violence perpetrated by unhoused individuals tend to dominate news headlines. City and state officials then respond with law enforcement, further “stoking fears” around public safety instead of providing resources to those in need, he continued.
Penny’s framing as a hero and Neely’s as a villain only works to move focus away from how to help vulnerable populations dealing with homelessness, Giffen said. “If what we’re saying is that it’s okay to attack somebody who’s acting in a way that makes you feel nervous, then the city is descending into chaos.”
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