(NewsNation) — On Monday, a jury found Daniel Penny not guilty in the death of Jordan Neely, who he held in a chokehold for roughly six minutes on a New York subway.
Neely, an agitated but unarmed homeless man, did not touch any passengers. One said he made lunging movements that alarmed her enough that she shielded her 5-year-old from him, which caused Marine veteran Penny to intervene.
Donte Mills, the attorney for Neely’s family, told “CUOMO” that Monday’s ruling shows “we don’t value” everyone equally.
“It’s clear that no one is saying Daniel Penny was wrong for stepping in, and I think that’s the misnomer that people have,” he said.
“We’re talking about two minutes later, three minutes later, four minutes later, five minutes later, up to six minutes when Daniel Penny is still choking Jordan Neely to death,” Mills continued. “And people are saying, ‘Let his neck go, you’re going to kill him.’”
A Manhattan jury cleared Penny of criminally negligent homicide in Neely’s 2023 death. A more serious manslaughter charge was dismissed last week because the jury deadlocked on that count.
The verdict came three days after Judge Maxwell Wiley dismissed the manslaughter charge against Penny. The judge’s ruling Friday left the jury to consider a lesser charge of criminally negligent homicide against Penny.
“This isn’t about whether he shouldn’t, should have stepped in in the beginning,” Mills said. “It’s whether he took it too far. And my fear is that we don’t value people like Jordan Neely enough to say his life is worth being defended in that moment.”
Chivona Newsome, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter Greater New York, joined “Dan Abrams Live” to discuss Neely’s death. She argued that because of his race, Neely was “still viewed as a criminal” long after he’d gone limp from Penny’s chokehold.
“Jordan Neely was in a chokehold for over four minutes, turning purple. … And people still saw him as a harm,” she explained.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.