What does a “jury of his peers” look like for Daniel Penny, now on trial in Manhattan Criminal Court for manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide in the choking death of Jordan Neely on an F train in May 2023?
It’s common for trial consultants to parse potential jurors by race, age and gender. But in this case, the real divide in the jury pool is transit: who takes the subway every day, and who doesn’t.
Would a disproportionate “work-from-home” jury help Penny or hurt him?
Last Monday, Judge Maxwell Wiley invited 450 or so potential jurors into his courtroom, giving each batch of 90 a standard spiel about the difficulties of serving on a six-week trial.
By Friday mid-morning, he’d winnowed the group down to 149, and that afternoon began to specifically question them to make sure the panel can be fair.
Continue reading the entire piece here at the New York Post
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Nicole Gelinas is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor at City Journal. Follow her on Twitter here.
Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
