BLM Leaders Rebuke Daniel Penny Jury and Judge: ‘White Supremacy’

Members of New York’s Black Lives Matter (BLM) chapter rebuked the jury and judge assigned to Daniel Penny’s manslaughter trial, with one activist saying on Friday that “white supremacy got another victory.”

Penny, a 26-year-old former U.S. Marine, faced manslaughter and criminal negligent homicide charges in the death of Jordan Neely, a 30-year-old homeless man who performed as a street artist. In May 2023, Neely, who was Black, was placed in a chokehold by the veteran from Long Island, who is white, after yelling at other passengers about being hungry in a crowded subway car in New York City.

Witnesses said Neely proclaimed that he didn’t care if he lived or died and that he wanted to return to jail. Penny and some others said they heard him say he was also ready to kill. Penny, who was already on the train when Neely boarded, approached him from behind and put him in a chokehold. Several minutes of the altercation were caught on bystander video and was a key piece of evidence in the trial.

The BLM activists’ remarks come after Justice Maxwell Wiley dismissed Penny’s manslaughter charge after the jury said they were deadlocked on whether to convict him of the top charge. The jury will return Monday to deliberate the lesser charge of criminally negligent homicide.

Hawk Newsome, co-founder of New York’s BLM chapter, told reporters outside court on Friday, “Racism is still alive and kicking in America…those among you who say that Daniel Penny is innocent, have racism and bias in your heart.”

“Today, white supremacy got another victory. Today, the KKK [Ku Klux Klan], the klansmen, the evil in America got another victory,” Newsome said, adding, that the nation will “continue to place second-class status on Black people.”

Newsome also accused Penny’s lawyers of picking a white supremacist jury specialist “to target the racists in that jury. The prosecution pointed out the fact that defense was eliminating people based on race.”

Newsweek reached out to Penny’s lawyer Thomas Kenniff’s law firm via email for comment about Newsome’s claims.

Chivona Renée Newsome, who founded New York’s BLM chapter with Hawk, compared the trial to something out of the Jim Crow era, a 100-year period after the Civil War in which Black people were marginalized through a set of laws that denied them basic rights, like the right to vote.

The activist said that the jury “no matter the facts, no matter the expert witnesses, no matter the people yelling on that train that day to let Jordan go, you will kill him—they will not find a white man guilty of killing a Black man in modern-day America.”

“This is no different than Jim Crow,” Chivona Renée Newsome said. “We had baby boomers who were there during Jim Crow on this jury. We have young people who are looking at Daniel Penny as a hero. In what America is a hero a killer?”

Meanwhile, prosecutors say that Penny’s chokehold is what ultimately killed Neely. However, Penny’s defense team’s pathologist said that Neely died from a combination of using synthetic marijuana, schizophrenia, the altercation with Penny and a genetic condition.

Penny’s lawyers also urge that he was protecting citizens in the subway from Neely.

The charge of criminally negligent homicide holds a maximum of four years in prison, but it is a lesser sentence than the second-degree manslaughter charge he previously faced, which could’ve gotten him up to 15 years in prison. If Penny is convicted of the criminally negligent homicide charge, the judge could also decide on a sentence that excludes prison time.

Penny’s lawyers previously told Newsweek: “Waiting as a jury deliberates is never easy when your client’s freedom hangs in the balance. Despite the anxiety inherent in the deliberation process, we remain confident that the jury, having heard the evidence, will return a full acquittal.”