What the Daniel Penny acquittal in NYC means for America
A New York City courtroom today issued a stunning verdict: Daniel Penny, a veteran US marine who restrained a threatening homeless subway rider named Jordan Neely, who later died in police custody, is not guilty of involuntary manslaughter or criminal negligence. And the verdict was not just about Penny. Make no mistake: the Black Lives Matter era of “restorative justice” is over and the real spirit of justice is returning to America.
Penny’s trial captured public attention because it dramatically emblematized this critical cultural faultline. Most immediately, it symbolized a recurrent theme in New York City about the failures of law enforcement, and the appropriate response to criminality. But it was also a story that the Left sought to turn into a racial morality play by repeating the BLM playbook they applied to the death of George Floyd, to Trayvon Martin, to Michael Brown and countless others.
In this story, Daniel Penny (“the white man” in the loaded description of the prosecutor Dafna Yoran) was a racist white man, who cruelly hunted down and killed an innocent black man (a “Micheal Jackson impersonator”) who was peacefully riding the subway. Neither man was really an individual; rather, each was a symbol of a system of racist white supremacy, organized around enacting violence on black bodies, for no reason, in the United States, and across the world.
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Christopher F. Rufo is a senior fellow and director of the Initiative on Critical Race Theory at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor of City Journal. He is the author of America's Cultural Revolution.
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