The judge overseeing the trial of Daniel Penny, who is accused of fatally strangling Jordan Neely on a New York City subway last year, said Friday that the jury was deadlocked in the case. The manslaughter charge was dismissed.
The decision, made at the request of prosecutors, means anonymous juries will only hear the lesser charge of criminally negligent homicide. The maximum penalty is four years’ imprisonment. Jurors were not informed of the prosecution’s request. Penny has pleaded not guilty.
Judge Maxwell Wylie told the jury: “You are now free to consider count two.” “I don’t know if it makes any difference.”
The jury, seven women and five men, will resume deliberations on Monday. They sent memos to the judges twice Friday, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, saying they could not reach a unanimous decision on the top level of second-degree manslaughter. After the initial notes, Wiley read out what is known as the Allen indictment to the jury and gave official instructions to continue deliberating with “open minds” in order to reach a unanimous verdict.
Before deliberations began Tuesday afternoon, Mr. Wylie told the jury that a unanimous decision on criminally negligent homicide would have to be reached before it would be allowed to consider criminally negligent homicide. They were also instructed to determine whether Penny’s actions caused Neely’s death and, if so, whether he acted recklessly and unreasonably.
Penny, a former Marine and architecture student, was headed to the gym after class on the afternoon of May 1, 2023, when she encountered an unstable Neely on the subway train.
When Neely, a former Michael Jackson impersonator, got on the train, he threw his jacket on the ground and yelled that he was hungry, that he was thirsty, and that he didn’t care if he died or went back to prison. Witnesses testified that he was yelling. Penny put him in a chokehold that prosecutors said lasted six minutes. It continued even after the Uptown F train arrived at its next stop, Broadway-Lafayette Station, according to eyewitness video. Neely, 30, was homeless and had a history of mental illness. At the time of his death, he had a synthetic marijuana compound known as K2 in his system.
The incident sparked a longstanding debate over racial justice and safety within the city’s subway system, as well as the city’s failure to address homelessness and mental illness, which Neely has struggled with.
Penny, 26, and his lawyer argued he was acting to protect other passengers and had no intention of harming Neely, only to restrain him until police arrived.
The city medical examiner ruled that Neely died from strangulation and neck compression, but Penny’s attorneys, Thomas Kenniff and Stephen Lazier, disputed that finding. are.
Outside the jury on Friday, Kenniff repeatedly asked the judge to declare a mistrial if the jury could not agree on a manslaughter charge. He also objected to the charges being dropped.
He said forcing “contrived unanimity” on minor charges is “essentially giving an elbow to the 12 jurors.”
Before the more serious charges were dismissed, the prosecution and defense had argued over whether the jury should be forced to continue deliberating.
“The jury has deliberated about 20 hours over four days in a case that in many ways has a simple factual basis, as far as what happened over a few minutes on video,” Kenniff told the judge. “We are concerned that admitting Allen’s charges under these circumstances would be coercive.”
Dafna Yoran, an assistant prosecutor in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, disagreed. She said that because the morning notes are the first sign of disagreement within the jury and jurors are not allowed to consider a second count, “it’s crazy for a hung jury to hang.” He said that the result would be “
Jurors have sent about 10 notes to the judge since deliberations began. They asked to rewatch the bystander video of Penny restraining Neely, the responding officer’s body camera video, and the subsequent video of Penny’s interview with two detectives at the precinct. They also asked that some of the coroner’s testimony be reheard and that the judge read back the definitions of recklessness and criminal negligence and provide those definitions in writing.
Between the two deadlocked notes, jurors asked for clarification or further details on the meaning of “a reasonable person” in the jury instructions.
“The gist of the memo is that this is a very conscientious jury that has approached this issue very methodically,” Wiley said Friday after the defense’s first motion for a mistrial. “So I think that’s the right thing to do, this is not the time to declare a miscarriage of justice. But on the other hand, this is not the time to think that they just sent this memo because it became difficult for them.”
Wiley then told jurors before dismissing the manslaughter charge that he did not want them to violate their conscience or abandon their best judgment.
“I would like to once again urge each of you to make every effort to achieve a just verdict here,” he said.
After initial notes indicating a deadlock, Wiley praised the jury’s work thus far and said it was not unusual for jurors to initially struggle to reach a unanimous verdict.
“I’ve been doing this for a little over two and a half days,” he said before instructing the jury to resume deliberations. “It’s a long time. But given the complexity of the facts of this case, I don’t think it’s too long.”
