A very good thing for the rule of law happened yesterday in New York City - the defendant in a kangaroo court facing a sham trial proceeding was acquitted. District Attorney Alvin Bragg and the judge in this case, Maxwell Wiley, rolled the dice on an attempt to use lawfare to railroad a retired United States Marine who intervened on a New York subway to stop a homeless man from threatening other passengers. It came up craps.
Daniel Penny was one of the passengers on a May 1st, 2023 train leaving the Second Avenue station when Jordan Neely, a 30-year old homeless man, began accosting everyone on board, screaming he was hungry, thirsty, needed a job, and wasn't afraid to go to prison or even to die. In short, he began wigging out. He threatened to kill everyone on the train. Penny stepped in and placed Neely in a restraining chokehold until the train reached the next stop, Broadway-Lafayette Streets. Neely slipped into unconsciousness and expired somewhere in that five-minute period. No other passenger was injured.
Bragg and Judge Wiley let the resulting trial of Penny turn on the narrative that he was the "white man" and the "white defendant" who killed a Black man, when there was zero evidence that race entered into the equation at all. It was not a racially-charged case until the prosecutors, abetted by the judge, made it so.
For eight weeks, jurors listened to evidence in a second-degree manslaughter indictment, and hung. By the end of last week, Bragg's team, with Judge Wiley's consent, dropped the manslaughter charge in an attempt to force the jury to now consider a second count of criminally negligent homicide, a charge for which the jury had not been presented a case. The bait and switch on indictments at the last minute was done over the objection of the defense. It was a mockery of the legal system.
The jury quickly acquitted Penny on Monday on the lesser charge, and he is now a free man. Bragg and Judge Wiley have been humiliated, and the American left wasted no time to compare Penny to Luigi Mangione, the suspected murderer of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Audie Cornish, who was in the anchor chair for Abby Phillip on CNN's NewsNight, couldn't resist setting the narrative.
CNN host Audie Cornish tries comparing the ass*ssination of UHC CEO to Daniel Penny protecting people on the subway.
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) December 10, 2024
Pure trash pic.twitter.com/0eyslH57Ci
She is far from the only one. Brooklyn Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez thinks the subway is safer with drug addicts freaking out on passengers than with people who stop threats from escalating.
AOC: The subway will be safer if we lock up people like Daniel Penny pic.twitter.com/6R5SyndtHc
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) December 10, 2024
Former assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Andrew C. McCarthy, writes this at Fox News about yet another travesty of justice in a New York courtroom at the hands of Alvin Bragg.
Yet, Wiley allowed Bragg to dismiss the reckless homicide charge for the purpose of continuing the trial and forcing the jury to deliberate on the lesser negligent-homicide offense. In essence, Bragg manufactured a partial verdict even though the jury did not reach one, and now wants the jury to continue deliberations as if this were only a negligence case – i.e., a case starkly different from the one prosecutors presented to the jury the last eight weeks. And this was done without the consent of the defendant.
Judge Wiley had full authority to grant Penny’s mistrial motion under Section 310.60 on the ground that the jury had deliberated for an extensive period of time without reaching any verdict. Instead, the judge bowed to Bragg’s Rube Goldberg plan: bring an exhausted, divided, already Allen-charged jury back to court Monday, to start all over again. The jurors have to be thinking that the court will keep them at it for as long as it takes to get Penny convicted of something.
It's wrong … but it’s so Manhattan.
The NAACP reliably jumped in to keep the racial element alive, using the death of Neely and acquittal of Penny as more evidence that we're a racist nation.
The acquittal of Daniel Penny in the death of Jordan Neely has effectively given license for vigilante justice to be waged on the Black community without consequence.
— NAACP (@NAACP) December 9, 2024
It's a painful reminder of the inequities in our justice system. Jordan deserved compassion. Instead, he was met… https://t.co/JOdxjZJXBi
Check out the community notes destroying the tweet by the NAACP, including a Black passenger assisting Penny in subduing Neely, another Black passenger testifying at Penny's trial on his behalf, and the fact that there was zero evidence of racial animus on Penny's part presented, other than drive-by comments by the prosecution team, allowed by the judge after objection, reminding the jury of Penny's skin color.
Black Lives Matter of Greater New York is represented by someone named Hawk Newsome, who held a press conference afterwards inciting stepped up race violence.
Hawk Newsome, who founded BLM of Greater New York, explicitly calls for black people to kill white people after the Penny verdict:
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) December 9, 2024
"We need some black vigilantes. People wanna jump up and choke us and kill us for being loud? How about we do the same?"pic.twitter.com/5hBUoo0oP9
Scott Jennings, the conservative star on CNN and the only person driving any ratings to the network, came up with a handy chart to help his friends on the left delineate between good guys and bad guys.
Jennings couldn't finish two sentences after his chart before Cornish decided that he would get no more unfiltered air time. She literally talked over him, preferring verbal static over conversation, because her narrative is much more important than Jennings reminding the country of what they already know - what makes up a hero and what makes up a villain.
Back to Alvin Bragg for a minute. After his political prosecution of Donald Trump, which only was possible with the help of a radical leftist jurist in Juan Merchan, Bragg has become the poster child of all that is wrong with district attorneys elected out of George Soros central casting. And as Brian Kilmeade of Fox notes, we may finally be at peak wokeness for D.A.'s. The tide may be turning.
Two reactions to the Penny case that will put a smile on your face. First, pro golfer Phil Mickelson weighed in on X this week.
Random thoughts
— Phil Mickelson (@PhilMickelson) December 9, 2024
Mike Tirico and Cris Collinsworth are great in the booth.
Day of the Jackal is an incredible show.
If a deranged individual threatens to kill you let’s hope there’s a Daniel Penny around.
Indeed. So what's next for Daniel Penny? Pictures online of he and his legal team at a New York pub hoisting a celebratory pint were posted online, but after this legal saga he's faced for the last couple years, has the damage to Penny's life and livelihood already been done?
Raymond Donovan was Ronald Reagan's Labor Secretary, and one of the first victims of political lawfare going back to 1984. Donovan, who never lost support of the President during his three-plus year legal ordeal, was indicted by a grand jury in the Bronx on charges of fraud and larceny over an extension project of a New York subway line. It was insinuated that Donovan had ties to the Mob, and resigned from Reagan's Cabinet five months after the indictment because of the scandal. In 1987, Donovan and his co-defendants were all acquitted in a trial that media covered every night. Afterwards, he was quoted as saying, "Which office do I go to get my reputation back?"
That sentiment has been cited hundreds of times since after every false accusation or acquittal, and has morphed as a quote over the decades. Ryan James Girdusky asked yesterday after the Daniel Perry was released from custody as a free man, where does he go to get his life back. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis stuck the rhetorical dismount.
Florida https://t.co/pFFDBQaSKf
— Ron DeSantis (@RonDeSantis) December 10, 2024
I'm not so naive as to believe that the weaponized lawfare genie can be stuffed back in the bottle. It can't, and it won't. But I am hopeful that as time passes and conservatives continue to refine both how to fight and communicate more effectively, the cost to the left of using lawfare as a political, social, and cultural weapon becomes sufficiently high enough that the American people will punish them at the ballot box. Maybe a sort of mutually-assured destruction atmosphere will develop, slowing down the frequency of using the tactic. And that would be a very good thing.
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