Oct. 21 — A hundred people came to the Criminal Courts Building in lower Manhattan this morning to demand justice for Jordan Neely. The 30-year-old Black man was strangled to death by the white vigilante Daniel Penny on May 1, 2023, inside a subway car.
Penny, a former Marine sergeant from West Islip, New York., was in court, where his trial began. He’s charged with second-degree manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide. Penny should be tried for first-degree murder instead.
The December 12th Movement called the protest, which began as a news conference and continued as a militant picket line. D12 chairman Omowale Clay and International Secretariat member Roger Wareham were among the speakers. Demonstrators chanted, “Never forget, never give up!'”
“The facts in this trial for the jury are simple,” the December 12th Movement said in its statement. “The only person on that train in Manhattan that became violent was Daniel Penny. He initiated violence!
“Daniel Penny, an ex-Marine soldier jumped on Jordan Neely and put him in a chokehold that ended life. Begging for food or money does not warrant being put into a chokehold. Period.”
Chokeholds can cause unconsciousness in two minutes and kill within five. Daniel Penny knew that as an ex-Marine trained in martial arts. New York Police Department officers are no longer allowed to use chokeholds, although they often violate the rule.
Penny took 15 minutes to strangle Jordan Neely on the “F” subway line at the Broadway/Lafayette stop in Manhattan. The homicide was recorded on video and seen by millions.
The killing of Jordan Neely is no different than the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis policeman Derek Chauvin, who put his knee on Floyd for 9 minutes and 29 seconds. Or the death of Eric Garner, who cried “I can’t breathe” 11 times as he was choked to death by a cop in Staten Island.
$3 million for a killer
Daniel Penny wasn’t even arrested by police and allowed to leave the scene. Nor were the person or persons detained who had assisted the killer by holding down Jordan Neely. It took 11 days for Penny to be charged.
Why wasn’t Penny taken to Rikers Island prison like the Black teenager Kalief Browder was? Accused of stealing a backpack, Browder spent almost three years in Rikers because he couldn’t afford bail. Browder’s charges were dropped, but he was so traumatized that he hanged himself two years later in 2015.
As Roger Wareham pointed out, the same New York Police Department that didn’t want to bust Daniel Penny used gunfire in a Sept. 16 incident involving alleged fare evasion. A 49-year-old subway rider, a bystander, was shot in the head because somebody else supposedly didn’t pay $2.90.
Wareham also denounced the $3 million that had been collected in support of the vigilante Daniel Penny. Over $2.6 million of the slush fund had been raised on the GiveSendGo site, which describes itself as “the #1 Christian fundraising site.”
GiveSendGo collected dough for the fascists who were allowed to storm the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Another recipient was Kyle Rittenhouse, who killed two anti-racists during a Black Lives Matter demonstration in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
Super bigot Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who wants to ban Black history, urged his followers to donate to the killer. So have fascist members of Congress Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz. Greene calls the vigilante a “hero.”
The campaign to defend Penny comes right from the top of capitalist society. “Free Daniel Penny” was the title of William McGurn’s May 15, 2023 column in the Wall Street Journal. McGurn was the chief speechwriter for the war criminal George W. Bush, who killed hundreds of thousands of people in Iraq.
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