Daniel Penny has been acquitted on all charges in the chokehold death of a homeless man aboard a New York City subway car last year.
The 26-year-old former Marine had been charged with second-degree manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide in connection with the May 2023 death of 30-year-old Jordan Neely.
Q jury found Penny not guilty of criminally negligent homicide Monday — three days after a Manhattan judge dismissed manslaughter charge when the 12-member panel said it could not come to a unanimous decision on the more serious of the two charges.
The second-degree manslaughter charge carried a maximum 15-year prison sentence; criminally negligent homicide carried a maximum sentence of four years. There was no minimum sentence for either charge.
During deliberations last week, jurors sent the judge numerous notes asking to review police and bystander video at the heart of the case as well as the testimony of Dr. Cynthia Harris, the medical examiner who performed the autopsy on Neely.
How the incident unfolded
Penny, an architecture student, was on his way to the gym when he encountered Neely on an uptown F train in Manhattan on the afternoon of May 1, 2023.
Witnesses say Neely was acting erratically after boarding the train before Penny placed him in a chokehold. Some witnesses told police that Neely shouted at other passengers, threw his jacket on the ground, complained of being hungry and thirsty and threatened to hurt people on the train. Others did not report hearing those threats.
Video taken by a fellow passenger shows Penny on the ground restraining Neely with a chokehold while two other men are standing over them. Penny then lets go of Neely, who is seen lying motionless on the floor of the train.
When police arrived, Neely was unresponsive and first responders were unable to revive him. He was then taken to a local hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
Footage of the chokehold was shared widely online and sparked protests around the city.
Penny later told police that he “just put [Neely] in a chokehold” and “put him out” to ensure he wouldn’t hurt anyone.
What's happened during the trial so far
Prosecutors with the Manhattan district attorney’s office argued that Penny’s chokehold — which lasted approximately six minutes — became reckless when he held on too long, beyond the point when Neely represented any kind of threat to fellow passengers.
Attorneys for Penny argued that he saw “a genuine threat and took action to protect the lives of others” and that he had restrained Neely with a “variation of a nonlethal chokehold” borrowed from martial arts training he had been taught as a Marine. In doing so, they suggested that Neely’s death could have been caused by something else.
But Harris, the medical examiner, testified that “there are no alternative reasonable explanations” for Neely’s death other than Penny’s chokehold.
Harris had ruled the cause of death was compression of the neck, or asphyxia.
Jurors were shown a video of an interview Penny gave to police in which he demonstrated the chokehold on Neely.
“He had his back turned to me and I got him in a hold, got him to the ground, and he’s still squirming around and going crazy,” Penny is heard saying in the video.
The defense also argued that Neely had prior arrests, a history of mental illness and drugs in his system at the time of his death.