The lack of action among New York City's prosecutors on crime has left its residents with the need for people like Daniel Penny to protect them from harm, his attorney Thomas Kenniff told Newsmax Friday.
"I'm not even going to get into politics here but to have this culture, this mentality among their prosecutors that crime is not something to be deterred, crime is not something to be addressed or punished in any real way, they have left the average person defenseless," Kenniff said on Newsmax's "Wake UP America."
"They've emasculated the decent police officers from doing the jobs that they're supposed to do," he added. "So now more than ever, unfortunately, you know, we need people like Danny Penny out there."
Penny was charged with manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide after he placed Jordan Neely, 30, a homeless man in a six-minutes-long chokehold after he reportedly threatened people on a New York subway in May 2023. Penny maintained the chokehold for 51 seconds after Neely lost consciousness and had stopped moving.
A jury this week acquitted Penny, a former U.S. Marine, of both charges, and his attorney told Newsmax Friday that he hopes that the fact that his client was charged with crimes does not scare others from acting when they see others in danger.
Penny, he added, reacted as a person would who has served in the military.
"This is probably true of most people who served the Marine Corps, that were in the military," said Kenniff. "People like that don't balance the equities … he could have kept his earbuds in, put his head down, and said 'Look, you know, statistically, maybe there's a 1 in 40 chance that Neely is actually going to get me instead of the mother or the child in the stroller or whoever.' That's not who he is."
He added that he hopes the acquittal will encourage others to step up and "do the right thing."
Meanwhile, the jury deadlocked on the more serious charge of manslaughter, but Kenniff said he and Penny's other attorneys felt "cautious optimism" as they waited.
"As a defense attorney, your clients aren't always the most wonderful, virtuous people out there," he said. "But in this case, we had a client who we knew was a very, very special human being who was there, accused through no fault of his own, only because he was trying to do the right thing, what we would want people to do. So it was very, very, very, very tense, I guess would be the way to put it."
There has also been some talk about filing a lawsuit for malicious prosecution against Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, but Kenniff said it's still early in the process.
But at the same time, some consultants were more experienced who say they had "never seen anything like what we saw in that courtroom," Kenniff said.
"I've never seen tactics like, I think I used the term bloodthirsty before, on the part of a prosecutor to convict and condemn someone like we saw in that courtroom," he said. "All options are on the table."
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Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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