After seven weeks and over 40 witnesses, a Manhattan jury is set to settle a debate that for more than a year has divided New Yorkers: whether Daniel Penny, an ex-Marine who fatally choked a homeless man in a subway car last year, is guilty of manslaughter.
On Tuesday, prosecutors will finish their closing arguments in the crowded and stuffy Manhattan courtroom where the drama has played out; the defense lawyers made their final appeal on Monday, trying to persuade the jury that their client should not be punished for the death of the man, Jordan Neely.
One of Mr. Penny’s lawyers tried to leave the jury with the image of his client as a protector. “The government is scapegoating the one man who was willing to stand up at the moment he was needed,” said the lawyer, Steven Raiser.
Dafna Yoran, an assistant district attorney, said in a summation that will continue Tuesday that what Mr. Penny did on May 1, 2023, was no accident. He was “all too aware of what the consequences could be,” she said.
“He was trained in this,” Ms. Yoran said, referring to the chokehold, “and yet he continued with the foreseeable and tragic results.”
The case has engrossed New Yorkers since video of Mr. Penny with his arms wrapped around the neck of Mr. Neely, a 30-year-old man with a history of mental health struggles, exploded online. The video went on for several minutes as Mr. Neely, in what would be the last moments of his life, tried desperately to stay alive: He clawed at Mr. Penny’s arm, tapped on the knee of a bystander, and, when that didn’t work, stretched his arms out to an empty subway bench.
To some, Mr. Penny was a protector whose actions reflected transit riders’ fears and frustrations. To others, the killing showed the city’s inability or unwillingness to help its most vulnerable and marginalized residents. And Mr. Penny, they said, should be prosecuted.
A year and a half later, the case has continued to captivate a city where President-elect Donald J. Trump has vowed to restore the rule of law — and where he won a greater share of the vote than any Republican nominee since 1988.
On Saturday, Mayor Eric Adams was asked about the case on a radio show. Rob Astorino, the host and a former Republican candidate for New York governor, said that some people could not understand why Mr. Penny, “who came to the rescue of others,” was on trial.
Mayor Adams replied that the city’s mental health system was “a complete failure.”
“You have someone on that subway who was responding, doing what we should have done,” Mr. Adams said. “Those passengers were afraid.”
But the 12 Manhattanites in the jury box who will decide whether Mr. Penny, 26, is guilty of manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide — and who are not allowed to listen to news about the trial — will not have heard Mr. Adams’s response.
Instead, they heard testimony from passengers, police officers, medical experts and relatives and friends of Mr. Penny. They watched hours of video and listened to recordings of 911 calls. If they find Mr. Penny guilty, he could face up to 15 years in prison.
On that May afternoon, Mr. Penny, an architecture student, had left class and was on his way to the gym when he boarded an uptown F train in Manhattan. There, he encountered Mr. Neely.
Mr. Neely boarded the train and began yelling, throwing his jacket on the floor and striding through the car, according to witnesses. As he approached other riders, he screamed that he was hungry, that he wanted to return to jail and that he did not care if he lived or died, they said.
Mr. Penny stepped in, according to witnesses and Mr. Penny himself. He approached Mr. Neely from behind and put him in a chokehold, taking the other man to the floor.
As they struggled, the train stopped at Broadway-Lafayette Street station and allowed passengers to leave the car. But, according to video taken by bystanders, Mr. Penny did not let go.
On Monday, Mr. Raiser tried to impress on the jury, for a last time, that his client could not have released Mr. Neely without putting others in danger. And Mr. Penny did not use enough pressure to kill the other man, he argued, asking the jurors to pay attention to how Mr. Neely had managed to move and struggle.
Mr. Penny had been trained in military chokeholds that can render someone unconscious swiftly, but his lawyer said he had instead used a “civilian restraint.”
Mr. Penny’s lawyers argued during the trial that the chokehold was not what killed Mr. Neely, and that it was impossible to know how much pressure Mr. Penny had exerted. They said that Mr. Neely’s schizophrenia, synthetic marijuana use and sickle cell trait had led to his death. A person with the trait has one of the two genes required to cause sickle cell disease, a painful and sometimes life-threatening illness.
“He was not dying due to Danny squeezing him to death,” Mr. Raiser told jurors Monday. “He was dying because he was being deprived of oxygen internally due to his medical condition.”
But the medical examiner, Dr. Cynthia Harris, determined that Mr. Neely had died from compression of the neck. She testified that the defense’s hypothesis was “so improbable that it stands shoulder-to-shoulder with impossibility.”
On Tuesday, prosecutors did not contest the motivation behind Mr. Penny’s actions. Ms. Yoran even allowed earlier in the trial that his initial efforts to restrain Mr. Neely may have been “laudable.” She argued, however, that Mr. Penny had committed a crime when he continued choking Mr. Neely after he no longer presented an imminent threat.
In an interview with detectives on the night of May 1, Mr. Penny sat “relaxed and comfortable,” Ms. Yoran said.
“There’s something else that is glaringly missing from this statement: any regret, any remorse, any self-reflection,” she said, adding: “He never expresses any sorrow about the man’s death. He doesn’t care.”
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