Daniel Penny, the man who choked Jordan Neely to death on a New York City subway train, is to be charged with manslaughter.
Manhattan prosecutors announced Thursday they would bring the criminal charge against Daniel Penny, 24, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran, in the May 1 death of Jordan Neely, 30.
Penny turned himself in at a Manhattan police station Friday morning.
Neely’s death, captured on video by a freelance journalist, has raised an uproar over many issues, including how those with mental illness are treated by the transit system and the city, as well as crime and vigilantism.
Even now media are having excruciating trouble saying plainly what happened, writing about Penny in the kind of vague, exonerative language that police and corporate spokespeople use in press releases disclosing officer-involved shootings and accidents involving toxic waste. The AP’s first sentence, for example, says Penny “kept a chokehold around the neck”, avoiding any suggestion of compression or force, “leading to the other rider’s death”, as if some unknowable chain of happenstance is present between that and the cessation of life. They will not even describe Penny as the active agent in his own conduct, even after Neely’s death was ruled a homicide and the killer was charged with the crime of manslaughter.
The story’s first quote is Penny’s lawyer praising him and the reporters’ first question is “how is Penny feeling?”
Asked how Penny was feeling, Kenniff said his client “is dealing with the situation, like I said, with the sort of integrity and honor that is characteristic of who he is and characteristic of his honorable service in the United States Marine Corps.”
Get ready for a year or two of the press anxiously wanting to know how Daniel Penny is feeling, between their stories about how violent crime is out of control in NYC.
