The man accused of killing a homeless street artist on a New York City subway
surrendered to police.
There's the pictures of it right there.
He is inside the precinct now.
We expect to see him again very shortly as he heads to court.
>> He's dealing with the situation, like I said, with the sort of integrity and
honor that is characteristic of who he is, characteristic of his honorable
service in the United States Marine Corps, and he hasn't [INAUDIBLE] held up.
>> So, yes, it took longer than a week, but there are actually charges now
against Daniel Penney, US Marine veteran, who, of course, killed Jordan Neely.
He is facing second degree manslaughter charges.
The maximum penalty, theoretically,
that he could face as a result of that would be 15 years.
You saw there statements from his attorney.
I'm gonna read you just a little bit more of what they had to say in response to
these developments.
When Mr. Penny, a decorated Marine veteran, stepped in to protect himself and
his fellow New Yorkers, his well-being was not assured.
He risked his own life and safety for the good of his fellow passengers.
The unfortunate result was the unintended and unforeseen death of Mr. Neely.
Adding a bit of my commentary right now, let's say that we accept that,
that's what manslaughter is, it's not necessarily intended.
People face charges for
even fully accidentally doing things through literally no fault of their own.
And I would argue that this is a case where if you wanted to imply that there
was some fault, there is room to do that.
In any event,
we're going to get into our discussion of what we think about these charges.
But first, I do wanna provide a counterpoint from the legal team for
Jordan Neely's family.
>> I wanna address something that we heard that Daniel Penny is saying.
He is saying that he saw Jordan ball up his fist.
And I just wanna mention to you this.
On May first, I'm sure the police questioned him.
I'm sure that everybody read the statement that he and his attorneys put out.
Was that anywhere in the statement?
Was it anywhere?
It was not.
And I'm telling you this, watch Jordan Neely's story get worse,
according to Daniel Penny, and watch Daniel Penny's story get better.
Daniel Penny is getting a chance to rewrite what happened in the subway
that day as time goes by.
He's gonna come up with more and more things to make himself look better,
because that's the only way that he can escape the consequences of what he did.
>> Well, look, that is definitely a possibility as a legal strategy.
We also had a number of witnesses, though it is possible that they will testify.
We'll end up seeing whether the accounting that is given by
Daniel Penny's legal team is consistent with what others say happened.
But I do wanna go to you Brett.
It wasn't guaranteed that there were gonna be any charges.
This one, you could theoretically see it as a significant charge.
What do you make of this?
>> Yeah, manslaughter, I don't know.
I don't have the facts of the case before me, and
manslaughter is definitely lower than murder.
Frequently it's just, well, the events kind of unfolded and there was a time when
you should have done something differently as opposed to I decided when I woke up
this morning I was gonna go murder somebody because I hate them.
But yeah, for me the takeaway from this is what can we have happen on the subway?
Can we as a society have happen on the subway?
And we as a society cannot have folks take it upon themselves completely untrained in
law enforcement, maybe in military, but
completely untrained in law enforcement and not in that jurisdiction.
We can't have them just suddenly headlock somebody and choke them out till they die.
We can't have that.
So a lot of folks would say, well,
we can't have people who are on the subway acting erratically, agreed.
I don't think we should have that and
I don't think there should be people getting murdered on the subway.
But these are not all the same scenario.
And in this scenario, it seems like they landed on manslaughter because,
yes, it was a disturbance on the subway, but
we can't have guys like this be like, well, I'm a marine,
I'm gonna choke him out because this is the job I've given myself right now.
>> Yeah, or I guess at the very least you could have the expectation that if you
believe that you get to be Batman, then do not choke the person to death.
You introduced a massive element of risk and didn't work out the way we're
assuming you are being accurate in saying you didn't intended to.
If we accept that he didn't intend to kill him,
he still did stuff that had a very high chance of killing him, and it killed him.
That's why we do not have one charge that can be lodged against someone who does
something that results in the death of another person.
There are many different gradations.
They did not invent the concept of manslaughter for this particular killing.
This is a very standard thing, and I think it's important for
us to recognize that because there are gonna be a lot of people who
are gonna attempt to convince you that that is not the case.
Now this is the first time anyone has ever faced any legal time for
something other than an intentional, planned out hit.
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