The political prosecution of Daniel Penny in New York City may have failed, but the chilling effect it will have on public safety, especially in the subway system, will resonate for years.
Penny is a former U.S. Marine who found himself in the same subway car as Jordan Neely, a mentally ill homeless man with a history of violence. According to witnesses who were in the same car, Neely was acting erratically and saying things such as, “Someone is going to die today,” and “I want to go to Rikers. I want to go to prison.” Penny put Neely in a chokehold to restrain him, and Neely ended up dying.
Most reasonable, rational people would view this as an unfortunate but expected outcome of threats of imminent violence by a mentally unstable vagrant. Penny acted heroically to protect people on the subway who would not have been able to protect themselves from Neely, whether he had any weapons or not. Neely’s death was avoidable, but it was avoidable if he had been under the supervision of a responsible justice system, mental health officials with the authority to keep him in their care, or a family who cared about him. Unfortunately for Neely, he had none of those things.
Unfortunately for Penny, the lack of a responsible justice system applied to him, too. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, notorious for letting violent criminals off the hook while trying to destroy people who protect themselves or others from violent criminals, decided that he must destroy Penny for his “crime,” a decision almost certainly influenced by the racial politics of criminal justice reform and Black Lives Matter, given that Penny is white and Neely was black.
Penny withstood the 19-month attempt by the New York City government to ruin his life, as, again, any reasonable and rational person could see that Penny acted heroically and committed no crime, and New York City happened to have at least 12 such people to sit on a jury. But the 19-month-long torment of Penny hasn’t just irreversibly changed his life. It has changed the safety of the New York City subway system for the worse and likely has done so for a long time.
In September 2023, four months after Penny restrained Neely, 60-year-old Laurell Reynolds was brutally beaten while waiting for the subway in Harlem. The man was a criminal with at least nine prior arrests, including multiple assaults. He beat Reynolds with her own cane for an unbearable two minutes, and Reynolds’s daughter later bemoaned the fact that no one intervened to help her. Of course, people taking the subway in New York City had already heard about Penny and knew they would be putting their own lives in danger only to risk being prosecuted as Penny was for their troubles.
Crime has only become worse in the subway system since then. Over the first three months of 2024, subway crime was up 13% compared to 2023, and assaults were up 11%. Gov. Kathy Hochul (D-NY) and Mayor Eric Adams, both Democrats, decided to turn the National Guard into bag checkers at subway entrances, a nice photo op but not exactly something that made subway passengers safer. Indeed, a man during rush hour was shot with his own gun after allegedly starting a confrontation with another passenger, leaving the subway car “covered with blood and ballistics.”
Before 2019, it took 15 years for New York City to hit 28 murders in the subway system, an average of under two per year. From March 2020 to April 2023, there were 27 murders, an average of around nine per year. There were “only” five subway murders in 2023, a drop from the 25-year-high of 10 in 2022, but in 2024, it rebounded to that same number. That includes the woman who was lit on fire by an illegal immigrant in a subway car in Brooklyn and the man stabbed to death at a subway station in Queens. In the case of the woman who was left to burn to death, no one intervened to put out the flames while her killer watched.
But the raw murder numbers do not capture the extent of this problem, as they do not include the people who, by a stroke of luck, managed to survive the attempts on their lives. That includes another person who was stabbed in the same stabbing incident in Queens. It also includes the woman who was punched in the back of the head and then stabbed in the throat. She said no one even called 911 to help her, let alone step in after she was hit with a sucker punch. She wasn’t even the only one stabbed in that attack.
That murder number also doesn’t include one last attempted murder to bring in the new year, in which Joseph Lynskey was shoved in front of a moving subway train, resulting in four broken ribs, a fractured skull, and a ruptured spleen. The man who nearly killed him “had a string of arrests for assault, harassment and weapons possession,” according to the New York Times, as well as “an open case in Brooklyn criminal court, where he is facing harassment and assault charges for throwing bleach on a woman and trying to kick down her door.”
The video of the attack on Lynskey almost perfectly captures the current state of the New York City subway system. Two fare dodgers jump the turnstiles to avoid paying, only for a random attempted murder in which a man shoves Lynskey in front of a moving train, leading the two men to hop the turnstiles the other way as they run.
The atmosphere of lawlessness certainly predates Penny and Neely becoming household names to tapped-in news audiences. The political decisions made by New York City and New York state Democrats to go soft on repeat violent criminals have made those criminals bolder and allowed them to be out on the street to commit these crimes. Those decisions have also made the subway a home for mentally disturbed vagrants who can snap at a moment’s notice, resulting in stabbings, beatings, or attacks such as the one on Lynskey.
But the prosecution of Penny removed the last possible safeguard subway passengers had. The lack of law enforcement and the performative stunts with the National Guard were not keeping anyone safe, but New Yorkers on the subway could at least put some comfort in the notion that their fellow New Yorkers wouldn’t be willing to let them die if someone decided to turn violent. It was a final bit of social cohesion, a thin thread holding together what little public safety the subway system had left.
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That thread snapped when Penny was targeted by Bragg for acting as the very Good Samaritan subway riders had in mind. The prosecution of Penny was not just an attack on the man. It was an attack on the very idea that people should try and help each other in dangerous situations in public at a time when Bragg and other New York Democrats had already made it clear that the justice system wouldn’t be stepping in on their behalf, either.
The message New York Democrats, including Bragg, have sent is that no one is going to protect you from dangerous thugs. Prosecutors won’t prosecute them, police won’t be allowed in the area, and the man to your left or right will have to fight for his freedom if he dares to intervene on your behalf. That is the Daniel Penny effect.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
