Daniel Penny lawyer fires back at Neely family attorney before grand jury indictment: ‘Very wrong on the law’
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‘Very important’ for Daniel Penny to counter media vitriol: Attorney Thomas Kenniff
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A lawyer representing Marine veteran Daniel Penny fired back at Jordan Neely’s family attorney on Wednesday, arguing that he is “very wrong on the law” moments before a grand jury voted to indict Penny.
Penny, 24, was arrested on manslaughter charges in the chokehold death of Neely, a 30-year-old erratic Black homeless man who prosecutors say was “making threats and scaring people” aboard a New York City subway. Penny’s lawyers have maintained the former Marine acted in self-defense and stepped in to protect other passengers on the train. A grand jury voted Wednesday to indict Penny on a second degree manslaughter charge. He faces up to 15 years in prison if convicted.
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Thomas Kenniff, a lawyer representing Penny, responded to Neely’s family lawyer in an interview on “The Story” Wednesday after he insisted that Neely – who suffered from mental illness – wasn’t harming anyone when Penny wrapped his hands around his neck to restrain him.
“We don’t want it where you can kill someone because you thought there was a possibility that they could do something to you. There was no attack,” Donte Mills, who represents the Neely family, said at a press conference. “Mr. Neely did not attack anyone. He did not touch anyone. He did not hit anyone. But he was choked to death.” Penny, he claimed, “acted with indifference. He didn’t care about Jordan, he cared about himself. And we can’t let that stand.”
Kenniff questioned Mills’ legal experience with criminal law, telling anchor Martha MacCallum that he is “very wrong” on the issue.
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“You know, I don’t know that gentleman. I don’t know how much criminal law that attorney practices. But he’s frankly just very, very wrong on the law,” he said. “The standard in New York State is [that] you don’t have to wait until someone physically attacks. You don’t have to wait until someone is lying on the ground or worse. The standard is whether a reasonable person in my client’s position would have feared imminent harm and the reality is, that it wasn’t just my client who expresses how terrified he was by Jordan Neely’s actions on the subway train that afternoon.”
“His words and that terror is corroborated by multiple civilian witnesses innocent bystanders on the train, by individuals that came and assists my client in restraining Mr. Neely because it was such a palpable fear that he introduced in that situation,” the lawyer added.
Penny released a series of videos over the weekend in which he recounted his perspective on the events leading to his altercation with Neely. Penny denied he was trying to choke Neely to death when he restrained him. He described the encounter as a “scary situation” and said he heard Neely yelling several threats at passengers aboard the train.
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“I was listening to music at the time, and I took my headphones out to hear what he was yelling,” the East Village resident continued. “The three main threats that he repeated over and over again were, ‘I’m going to kill you,’ ‘I’m prepared to go to jail for life,’ and, ‘I’m willing to die.’”
Penny said Neely appeared to be on drugs when he “ripped his jacket off and threw it down at the people sitting next to me at my left.” The former Marine, who served four years, said he jumped into action to restrain Neely using a chokehold, which was captured on video, but had no intention of choking Neely to death.
“Some people say I was trying to choke him to death, which is also not true. I was trying to restrain him,” Penny continued. “You can see in the video there’s a clear rise and fall of his chest, indicating that he’s breathing. I’m trying to restrain him from being able to carry out the threats.”
Kenniff, who declined to say whether his client testified before the grand jury, said that Penny’s legal team encouraged him to offer his side of the story publicly to counter the narrative from critics who rushed to label him as a “racist” and a “killer.”
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“If you look at some of the vitriol that has been directed against my client, since the very beginning of this case, loaded disparagements like ‘killer, racist, vigilante,’ that has been allowed to kick around the stratosphere both in television and print media social media for weeks now. So you reach a point where you have to make a decision,” Kenniff said. “While this sort of default decision might be to have not to have your client say anything, in this situation we thought it was very important that we make a decision to have him counter that narrative.”
Penny told Fox News Digital in an interview last week that being called a racist “definitely hurts a lot” and said it has “taken a toll” on him.
In Sunday’s videos, Penny again denied that race was factor behind his actions, calling those claims “absolutely ridiculous.”
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“I didn’t see a Black man threatening passengers, I saw a man threatening passengers, a lot of whom were people of color,” Penny said. “The man who helped restrain Mr. Neely was a person of color. A few days after the incident I read in the papers that a woman of color came out and called me a hero.”