Jordan Neely Michael Jackson Impersonator dies at age 30

Marine Veteran Daniel Penny Faces Manslaughter Charges in New York City for Chokehold Death of Homeless Man Jordan Neely on Subway Train

In a significant case that has caught the attention of many, a Marine veteran is facing trial for the death of a homeless man on a New York City subway.

Daniel Penny, the veteran in question, showed up in court recently, stepping into a legal battle that could have serious implications for both him and the public.

Background of the Incident

The incident that sparked this trial occurred in May 2023 when Jordan Neely, a homeless man known for impersonating Michael Jackson, was behaving erratically on the subway.

His actions left many passengers feeling unsafe.

According to Penny, he intervened out of concern for the safety of those around him, using a chokehold in an attempt to subdue Neely.

The Legal Proceedings

On Thursday, just before his jury trial, Penny attended a pre-trial hearing at the Manhattan Supreme Court.

This hearing aimed to outline what evidence will be presented during the trial, which is set to begin next week.

The case has become a flashpoint, igniting strong opinions across the nation.

Public Reaction

The public reaction to this incident has been polarized.

Some view Penny as a hero, acting bravely in a dangerous situation, while others argue that his actions were an excessive use of force against a vulnerable individual struggling with mental health issues.

Defense Arguments

Penny’s defense team plans to highlight Neely’s past criminal history, particularly incidents involving public transportation and his documented struggles with mental health.

They argue that Penny was acting in self-defense, motivated by a genuine desire to protect the other passengers on the train.

Prosecution’s Counterpoints

However, prosecutors are pushing back against these claims.

They contend that Penny’s use of force was unnecessary and reckless, particularly given his background as a Marine, which should have made him aware of the potential consequences of his actions.

They also assert that Neely’s past and mental health should not be used as excuses for the chokehold.

Neely’s Criminal History

Neely’s past is indeed troubling.

He had a lengthy criminal record, including a 2021 incident where he assaulted an elderly woman, leaving her with severe injuries.

He had also faced various charges over the years for offenses ranging from public lewdness to misdemeanor assault.

Some of these cases were resolved through plea deals that required him to seek treatment.

The Fateful Day

During the confrontation on the subway, Assistant District Attorney Joshua Steinglass highlighted that the train doors opened less than 30 seconds after the chokehold began.

This was a critical moment, as passengers who had felt trapped were finally able to escape.

Yet, Penny reportedly continued to restrain Neely, raising questions about his intentions and decision-making during the incident.

Legal Thresholds

Steinglass pointed out that for a second-degree manslaughter charge, the prosecution only needs to prove that Penny acted recklessly, not with intent to kill.

This makes the upcoming trial all the more crucial as it will delve into the complexities of the case, including the factors leading up to the tragic outcome.

What’s Next?

As the trial approaches, both sides are gearing up for what promises to be a heated legal battle.

With the community and the nation watching closely, the case will undoubtedly raise important questions about safety, mental health, and the responsibilities of individuals in crisis situations.

tdpelmedia.com/marine-veteran-daniel-penny-faces-manslaughter-charges-in-new-york-city-for-chokehold-death-of-homeless-man-jordan-neely-on-subway-train/

Judge Rules All Evidence to Be Admissible in Daniel Penny Trial

The outcome of this trial will have broader implications for how self-defense is interpreted and the legal consequences of intervening in public disputes

The trial of Daniel Penny will soon get underway. He is facing manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide charges for choking Jordan Neely on the F train last year but he has pleaded not guilty to the charges.

Penny has admitted to wrapping his arms around Neely’s neck, but says he was trying to protect fellow subway riders because Neely was violent and scaring people.

The ex-marine told police that Jordan Neely, a Michael Jackson impersonator who was “busking” on the subway, became aggressive and was “going crazy” and that he put Neely “in a choke” because Neely “was threatening everybody,” according to court records.

“I had him pretty good,” Penny told an officer at the Broadway-Lafayette Street station, records show. “I was in the Marine Corps.”

Freelance journalist Juan Alberto Vázquez, who witnessed the incident, said that Neely removed his jacket and threw it violently to the floor, resulting in other passengers moving away from him. Penny then approached Neely from behind and put him in a chokehold. Vásquez told The New York Times that Neely began screaming, “I don’t have food, I don’t have a drink, I’m fed up. I don’t mind going to jail and getting life in prison. I’m ready to die.” Another witness heard Neely say, “someone is going to die today.” Vasquez said that Neely was frightening but “had not assaulted anyone”. Other witnesses said that Neely made “half-lunge movements” at other passengers and was within “half a foot of people” and recalled fearing for their lives.

The case of Daniel Penny has garnered significant media attention due to the circumstances surrounding the trial, which sparked a debate on the use of force and the responsibilities of individuals when intervening in public altercations. The defense argues that Penny acted in self-defense and was attempting to deescalate a threatening situation, while the prosecution contends that the force used was excessive and resulted in Neely’s death.

Witnesses maintain that Penny held the choke long after Neely had gone limp, and that they had warned him, “you’re going to kill him now.” A video of Penny holding Neely on the floor of the subway went viral at a time when crime and mentally ill people in the subway were top priority issues for the public. However, subsequently, sympathy shifted to Neely as race was injected into the situation; Neely became the face of the many vulnerable people who suffered from mental illness and homelessness, while Penny was white.

As the trial approaches, new evidence has been presented, and the judge has ruled that all evidence, including videos and Penny’s interview with the police, will be admissible. This decision is crucial as it could influence the jury’s perspective on Penny’s actions and intentions at the time of the incident.

The outcome of this trial will likely have broader implications for how self-defense is interpreted and the legal consequences of intervening in public disputes. It also raises important questions about mental health and the support systems in place for individuals struggling with such issues.

The trial is set to begin on October 8, with jury selection starting on October 21. If convicted, Penny faces up to 20 years in prison. The case continues to be closely watched by the public and legal experts alike, as it touches on sensitive and complex issues that resonate with many.

lavocedinewyork.com/en/new-york/2024/10/05/judge-rules-all-evidence-to-be-admissible-in-daniel-penny-trial/

Homelessness, mental health and subway safety: How Hochul and Adams faced the trifecta in NY

Daniel Penny is going on trial this month on charges of manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide, nearly a year-and-a-half after the former Marine put fellow passenger Jordan Neely — who struggled with mental health issues and homelessness for much of his life — in a fatal chokehold on a crowded F train. Penny has pleaded not guilty to the charges.

The incident surfaced a deep divide in how New Yorkers view the city’s approach to homelessness, mental health and public safety — a trifecta that Mayor Eric Adams and Gov. Kathy Hochul frequently invoked and pledged to address even before the fatal encounter on May 1, 2023. Their approach has combined increased outreach to homeless people with more policing and involuntary interventions.

Adams and Hochul have largely followed through on the plans they began to set in motion ahead of Neely’s death. They’ve flooded the subway with more than 2,000 more police officers per day, made it easier to involuntarily transport people to the hospital for mental health evaluations, and added to the constellation of outreach workers who seek to engage homeless New Yorkers living outside the city’s shelters.

Adams says the city is also still plugging away at his 2022 initiative to push people sleeping in the subway to go above ground.

But the overall impact of the moves remains unclear, with some advocates calling for more data on long-term outcomes for those whom the city seeks to help.

Spokespeople for both Adams and Hochul say that their outreach teams are making progress in connecting people in the subway to permanent housing, though homeless service providers say reaching that goal can be challenging because of the limited housing supply and the issues their clients face.

But subway outreach workers say the vast police presence in the subway sometimes makes connecting with the people they're trying to serve more difficult, and are divided on whether police involvement helps or hurts. Meanwhile, City Hall has declined to provide an update on involuntary hospital transports, and existing data from the city and state has failed to capture what happens after someone is taken to the hospital.

The city doesn’t appear to be making significant progress in reducing unsheltered street and subway homelessness overall, although some advocates say it can be hard to get an accurate estimate. The city’s 2024 survey of New Yorkers living on the streets and in the subway, conducted in January, estimated there were more than 4,000 unsheltered individuals across the city, about a 2% increase from the previous year. About half resided in the subway, a 4% decrease from 2023. Since then, the Adams administration has implemented policies limiting the amount of time migrants can spend in city shelters, potentially contributing to more unsheltered homelessness.

But as far as subway safety, Adams insists, “We are on the right track.” He has recently touted figures showing that subway crime is on the decline overall, with a 5.1% drop this year to date.

It’s unclear how much of the crime in the subway is committed by people who are homeless or dealing with mental health issues, and advocates say these vulnerable New Yorkers are themselves put at risk when officials link their presence too closely with subway safety. But many subway riders are still on edge. In an MTA survey conducted earlier this year, 44% of respondents said people acting erratically on the train affected their satisfaction with the transit system, making it the top concern ahead of “quality of life” issues, and the desire for more reliable service.

Finding people permanent housing

Since taking office in 2022, Adams has doubled the number of city-funded workers doing homeless outreach on the streets and in the subways and connected more than 2,000 people to permanent housing, according to City Hall spokesperson William Fowler. That’s about the same number of housing placements the city made for homeless New Yorkers through outreach teams under former Mayor Bill de Blasio during his second term in office, according to a 2019 report on his administration’s street outreach efforts.

Meanwhile, Hochul’s Office of Mental Health has launched its own outreach program in partnership with the MTA, which primarily targets the subway. The program, known as SOS, landed an additional 577 people in their own apartments between its launch in April 2022 and the end of September, according to state data.

A key component of the SOS program is that caseworkers stick with their clients for up to a year after they are placed in an apartment to ensure they are settled and connected to services in the community, to try to ensure they don’t end up back on the street, said Tracy Wilson, the director of the Homeless Support Unit at the Office of Mental Health.

“It's very challenging, especially early on,” Wilson said. “They really do need a high level of support to make sure that they're able to be successful in that new setting.”

Typically, both city and state outreach programs offer people a range of services to try to meet their immediate needs. Workers then seek to get people to agree to move from the subway or street into transitional housing such as safe havens — shelters with fewer rules and lower barriers to entry — before helping them find a permanent place to stay. The goal is often to get them into a supportive housing program that offers subsidized rent and social services.

But Wilson said SOS is also building up a supply of 300 apartments in the city that are exclusively for members of the program, where clients are able to move in on the spot without stopping in a shelter or other transitional housing first. This model is known as "housing first," and many social services providers tout it as the ideal way to help people become more stable, but it is otherwise practically nonexistent in New York City.

“I've been doing this job for more than 35 years and I've never met somebody who would turn down an offer of an actual apartment,” said David Giffen, executive director of Coalition for the Homeless, who lamented that there is not a greater focus on “housing first.”

Even with some on-demand apartments, street and subway outreach can be a slow process. SOS workers often spend months building a rapport with clients and establishing trust, Wilson said. “We really try to encourage the teams to figure out what people's dreams and aspirations are and then try to find a way to connect housing and services to achieving that dream,” she said.

When asked whether the presence of police in the subway ever creates tension with clients, Wilson said, “It does make it challenging at times, I can’t lie.”

She said some officers “really understand” the work and help SOS teams identify people who need help. But she added that the city’s policy of trying to remove people from the subways can also make outreach work harder. “It's just tricky trying to find people if they're being told that they need to be off the premises.”

When the mayor was asked about that issue at a press conference announcing a new subway outreach team last week, he dismissed the concern.

“The subway is not a place to house New Yorkers,” Adams said. “Previous administrations may have just ignored it. But we made it clear. People cannot have a dignified place to live in the subway system.”

Providing services — whether people like it or not

In the aftermath of Neely’s death, some New Yorkers protested not just Neely’s killing, but also Adams’ hesitation to condemn Penny’s actions and the persistence with which Adams and Hochul had linked New Yorkers’ safety in the subway with homelessness and mental illness. Some advocates say the policies and rhetoric the pair have embraced since then continue to do a disservice to people who are homeless or dealing with mental health issues.

“To automatically make the assumption that somebody who committed a crime in the subway system or on the street has a mental health issue is criminalizing mental illness,” said Jonathan Chung, director of public policy and advocacy at the New York City chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

But Hochul and Adams have since stood behind their mix of policing and outreach, and have both launched their own outreach teams that have embedded law enforcement officers.

Adams’ latest outreach model, known as PATH, features teams of four police officers, a nurse and two service coordinators. One PATH outreach worker, Shawn Tish, said police presence can put off some potential clients but added that officers typically only intervene if someone tries to attack him or one of his colleagues.

Since the PATH program launched in late August, however, the officers on the teams have also issued 18 summonses and removed 190 people from the subways, according to city data. The teams have connected more than 500 New Yorkers to some type of services, such as temporary housing or medical care.

Some advocates lament that the city and state are both still committed to policies and programs that involve police or involuntary interventions, including taking people to the hospital without their consent.

“It traumatizes those individuals who are involuntarily transported,” said Giffen of Coalition for the Homeless.

But involuntary transports happened before Adams or Hochul took office — and it’s still unclear how much they've increased in recent years or what the effect of the new policy has been.

Hochul’s SCOUT teams, which include police and clinicians, specifically seek to identify people in the subway who might need to be hospitalized. Since launching in March, they have transported about 70 people to the hospital involuntarily, in addition to 32 who agreed to go of their own will, and 126 who accepted transportation to a shelter or safe haven.

City officials shared last November that an average of 137 New Yorkers were being taken to the hospital involuntarily each week overall, but said at the time that there was not enough data to compare that figure to involuntary transports before the new policy took effect. The city also did not provide any information at the time on how many people who were taken to the hospital involuntarily were actually admitted, or what kind of services they received afterward.

When asked for the latest data on involuntary transports last week, Fowler said the city is holding off on providing those figures until its annual update next month. He also declined to provide an immediate update on efforts to meet the needs of those on the city’s Top 50 list of the “hardest to reach” New Yorkers — which once included Neely.

gothamist.com/news/homelessness-mental-health-and-subway-safety-how-hochul-and-adams-faced-the-trifecta-in-ny

Daniel Penny set to stand trial in death of Jordan Neely

Penny has pleaded not guilty to the charges.

The trial of Daniel Penny, the Marine veteran charged in the May 2023 choking death of a homeless man in a New York City subway car, is set to begin Monday with jury selection.

The trial is expected to last between four and six weeks, according to Judge Max Wiley.

Penny, 25, has pleaded not guilty to the charges of second-degree manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide in connection with Jordan Neely's death.

Wiley denied Penny's bid to dismiss his involuntary manslaughter case in January.

Penny put Neely, 30, in a fatal chokehold "that lasted approximately 6 minutes and continued well past the point at which Mr. Neely had stopped purposeful movement," prosecutors with the Manhattan District Attorney's Office have said.

Penny's attorneys have said that they were “saddened at the loss of human life” but that Penny saw “a genuine threat and took action to protect the lives of others," arguing that Neely was "insanely threatening" to passengers aboard the F train in Manhattan.

Witness accounts differ on Neely’s behavior in the train, prosecutors say.

They note that many witnesses relayed that Neely expressed that he was homeless, hungry and thirsty, and most of the witnesses recount that Neely indicated a willingness to go to jail or prison.

Some witnesses report that Neely threatened to hurt people on the train, while others did not report hearing those threats.

Some witnesses told police that Neely was yelling and harassing passengers on the train; however, others have said though Neely had exhibited erratic behavior, he had not been threatening anyone in particular and had not become violent.

Some passengers on the train that day said they didn't feel threatened -- one "wasn't really worried about what was going on" and another called it "like another day typically in New York. That's what I'm used to seeing. I wasn't really looking at it if I was going to be threatened or anything to that nature, but it was a little different because, you know, you don't really hear anybody saying anything like that," according to court filings by the prosecution.

Other passengers described their fear in court filings. One passenger said they "have encountered many things, but nothing that put fear into me like that." Another said Neely was making “half-lunge movements” and coming within a “half a foot of people."

Neely, who was homeless at the time of his death, had a documented mental health history and a history of arrests, including alleged instances of disorderly conduct, fare evasion and assault, according to police sources.

Less than 30 seconds after Penny allegedly put Neely into a chokehold, the train arrived at the Broadway-Lafayette Station: "Passengers who had felt fearful on account of being trapped on the train were now free to exit the train. The defendant continued holding Mr. Neely around the neck,” said prosecutor Joshua Steinglass in a court filing against Penny's dismissal request. Wiley denied all motions to suppress evidence on Oct. 4.

Footage of the interaction, which began about 2 minutes after the incident started, captures Penny holding Neely for about 4 minutes and 57 seconds on a relatively empty train with a couple of male passengers nearby.

Prosecutors said that about 3 minutes and 10 seconds into the video, Neely ceases all purposeful movement.

abcnews.go.com/US/daniel-penny-set-stand-trial-death-jordan-neely/story?id=113548282

Daniel Penny set to stand trial this week for chokehold death of subway performer Jordan Neely

Daniel Penny, the white ex-Marine charged with choking homeless Black subway performer Jordan Neely to death on an F train last year, is set to go on trial this week.

Penny, who is criminally charged with manslaughter in the May 2023 death of Neely, will appear in Manhattan Criminal Court on Monday for the start of jury selection in the trial, with the Long Island native’s fate up to 12 jurors in a case that has sparked intense debate on racial profiling, vigilante justice, and the city’s treatment of the homeless and mentally ill.

Penny was caught on video restraining Neely on the floor of an F train in Manhattan on May 1, 2023, holding Neely by the neck — with assistance from two other passengers — for several minutes until and even after he stopped moving.

What happened before the footage started rolling is a matter of intense debate. Witnesses have said Neely was screaming and acting erratically towards other passengers on the train, and Penny has argued he took action to protect himself and other riders. But there is no indication Neely had physically threatened anyone prior to Penny’s intervention.

Penny was questioned by police and released without charges the night of the incident; his lawyers lost motions earlier this month to have Penny’s statements to the NYPD and police bodycam footage excluded from the trial.

Penny would not face charges for nearly two weeks, sparking days of major protests throughout the city. Protesters plan to demonstrate outside the Manhattan criminal courthouse for the duration of the trial; jury selection begins on Monday.

The defendant has pled not guilty and is free on $100,000 bond. He faces up to 19 years in prison if convicted on both counts of manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide.

Penny and his lawyers insist the ex-Marine was acting in self-defense and did not intend to kill Neely. But prosecutors need not prove intent, only that Penny’s actions were reckless and caused Neely’s death.

Penny has insisted he is not a racist, citing a trip to Africa he was planning on taking before the incident. The incident is reminiscent of another subway vigilante case from 40 years prior, that of Bernie Goetz, who shot four Black youth he claimed were trying to rob him on the subway; that case also became a racial flashpoint in the Big Apple.

Much like the Kyle Rittenhouse case, in which a white teenager shot multiple protesters, Penny has become a cause celebre for right-wing politicians and pundits. His legal defense fund has raised millions of dollars from conservatives around the country, far more than the Neely family could raise to pay for his funeral.

Civil rights leaders, such as the Rev. Al Sharpton, have raised the question of whether the response to the crime would be different had the races of Penny and Neely been reversed.

www.amny.com/transit/daniel-penny-trial-starts-jordan-neely-chokehold/