the penny drops?

assessing the penny trial and jury deliberations

as many of you may have seen yesterday, the jury in the daniel penny trial deadlocked on the manslaughter charge and were unable to reach a unanimous verdict. here’s where it gets weird:

there still remained the 2nd charge of “criminally negligent homicide” but the jury was unable to move on to consider it owing to the vagaries of the instructions with which they had been provided by the judge.

they were as follows:

as can be seen, the outcome of the first charge created a predicate scenario that governed even being able to consider the second and that’s a legal quagmire.

the prosecutor, realizing this was heading for mistrial then suggested dismissing the manslaughter charge and reducing the case just to the second charge. this led to the seemingly perverse (but actually sensible) outcome of the defense then objecting to this dismissal. this was the obvious call for them. if they win the motion, it’s a mistrial and they’re happy to take a chance that no one wants to retry this. if they lose (as they did) the manslaughter charge is gone and most importantly cannot be brought again as that’s double jeopardy.

that the judge chose to let the prosecutor dismiss it in order to “get to the other charge” is a pretty iffy move, is really starting to rack up grounds for appeal, and carries with it some nasty baggage:

i think penny’s lawyers are very right here. the incentives created by allowing such a move are awful. it will, in the future, embolden prosecutors to over-charge defendants to generate fear, complexity, and likelihood of being forced into taking a bad deal because if they prove too flimsy you can just dump them and move on to the lesser charges you charged as well. charges like “criminally negligent homicide.”

if you have no idea what this is, don’t feel bad. neither did i. i asked grok (who is actually getting pretty good at this)

so, much lower standard. it’s “gross negligence with regard to a duty of care owed to the victim that resulted in their death.”

this is why whether or not penny was shown to be “justified” in what he did was part of the predicate jury instruction.

the jury is coming back on monday to deliberate on this new charge.

it’s my hope those refusing to convict on manslaughter stand firm on penny being justified because the case here is clear even if the outcome is unfortunate.

to my mind, it’s simple: the duty of care that you owe to someone making credible threats to murder people is zero and it is not negligence to use proportional force.

neely was threatening to kill people on the subway. he literally said “someone is going to die today!” he was screaming at a mom and her 2 year old who was in a stroller.

you tell me what kind of world you want to live in:

this one

or this one:

“rare occasions”? well, only if you live in a sane place. if you inhabit a madness carnival like the NYC subway, i’m not so sure about rare. but “rare” is still a weasel word. this is not about whether the situation was common, it’s whether a reasonable person would fear for their life or the lives of others when placed in it.

neely has assaulted numerous people quite severely including literally breaking a senior citizen’s face on the subway. he kidnapped a child. he’s ranting about killing people at a 2 year old.

sorry, but if this is not over the line on your standard for “reasonably feared for the life and safety of those threatened” i’d love to know what is. does he actually have to eat their face first? because that’s not a standard that works.

the reason this happened is that because despite over 40 arrests and being out on an assault warrant, the courts kept treating this mentally ill menace to everyone like he was some fragile, misunderstood child and setting him free. 40 arrests. many violent. still out yelling at toddlers on the train.

penny is not the aggressor here, the justice system is.

they made this happen.

prosecutors like dafna yoran made this happen because they put absurdist politics and preferencing over justice or safety. dafna is married to pervuvian BLM activist ms. ana de orbegoso. her positions on “race over character” are clear as acetone. she’s all activist, no jurist. she is craven and captured.

but let us hope the jury is not because, right on cue, here’s BLM making threats to riot over the verdict.

america hates you. glass has to break. cars have to burn.

charming.

this is just rancid bile. she’s race baiting for profit and to cast the aggressor as the victim. she’s “hugging a father” that abandoned his mentally ill boy to the streets and is just back now for a little fame, maybe a book deal, and a civil suit that could set him up for life for his tragic loss of a son he’d long since thrown away.

it’s grotesque.

garbage people always oppose any action against garbage people because it elevates quality people and makes the trash-folk feel bad about themselves.

they despise nobility and virtue precisely because they are virtues.

they don't actually care about the victims. they would not cross the street to piss on them if they were on fire. they just want to attack the heroes out of envy and hate and to see if they can make a buck.

everyhting about this is self-serving, calculated self-advancement through intimidation and assault. they are quite literally now the ones on the subway threatening to burn and loot if they are not given what they want.

neely is a BLM avatar: the coddled child given license to barbarism and violence by a system too afraid and addled to stop them.

this is pure jury intimidation.

it’s intimidation of the whole city.

and 4 years ago, it might have worked.

but i don’t think it’s going to work anymore.

people have had enough. they’re ready to stand up to the bully and send them packing.

what happened here was terrible, but blaming the guy who tried to stop the train crash that the justice system’s gross negligence made inevitable is not the way.

the case for criminally negligent homicide is stronger against dafna than it is against daniel. they just kept putting violent, poorly calibrated, poorly functioning people back out on the street again and again no matter who they hurt. how else was this ever going to go?

blaming he who did the right thing despite being in the wrong place at the wrong time is unjust and counter to the basis for any sort of sound society.

this goes for everyone: