Good for the jury for finding Daniel Penny not guilty. But this does not erase the cynical, wrongheaded, and unwarranted prosecution by Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg against a Good Samaritan. Daniel Penny believed he was saving lives a year and a half ago on the subway when he restrained Jordan Neely, who was threatening to harm commuters.
After the acquittal, Bragg issued a statement in which he claimed, “As with every case, we followed the facts and the evidence from beginning to end.” If only.
Neely, a homeless man, had been arrested 42 times between 2013 and 2021. Other subway riders at the scene reported feeling terrorized as Neely said he was “ready to die.” There were also legitimate questions about whether the chokehold Penny held him in actually killed him. When the police questioned Penny, he said that his only intent had been to protect the others in the subway car that morning.
Yet Bragg threw the book at Penny, charging him with both manslaughter in the second degree, which carries a potential 15-year prison sentence, and criminally negligent homicide, which has a four-year maximum sentence. On Friday, after the jury deadlocked on the manslaughter charge, Bragg’s office conspired with the judge to drop it and have the jury focus on the lesser charge instead. Not only was this an unethical gaming of the system, it completely backfired when, after deliberating for less than an hour on Monday morning, the jury came back with its “not guilty” verdict.
The DA’s decision to prosecute Daniel Penny was no anomaly. Bragg’s tenure has been marked by priorities that don’t serve the public, and a nonchalant attitude toward criminal behavior that has all but guaranteed an increase in crime in New York. In sum, Bragg has made New York a more dangerous city. What’s more, while ignoring real crime, he has gone after politically convenient targets—like Daniel Penny—generating an enormous amount of cynicism among New Yorkers.
When Bragg ran for district attorney in 2021, he promised voters he would focus on racial equity over minor irritations like property crime. “I think we need to move away from what I would call a crime of poverty,” he said at a campaign event. Bragg’s first memo announcing his office’s priorities said he would no longer prosecute a host of crimes ranging from prostitution and trespassing to not paying for the subway, and would focus instead on police accountability and restoring trust and transparency.
But his approach has been a disaster, as has been true of every city that voted in a so-called progressive prosecutor. As of November 2024, according to the New York Post, there were 27,122 reported felonies, up 16.9 percent from before Bragg took office. Meanwhile, rape has jumped 7.4 percent across Manhattan, robbery 8.9 percent, felony assault 16.8 percent, and grand larceny 29.8 percent.
Our nation’s greatest city should not be an experiment for social engineering. Most of the victims of the petty property crimes Bragg ignores are themselves working-class New Yorkers.
When presented with new data, thoughtful people are willing to change their minds. But Bragg has stuck to his guns. In February, for instance, his office allowed five of the six migrants arrested for a Times Square assault on two police officers to be released without bail. In June he dropped charges for 31 of the 46 people arrested for taking over Columbia University’s Hamilton Hall. The examples go on and on.
And then there was his prosecution of Donald Trump last year. We are no apologists for the incoming president. We believe he should have been impeached and removed from office for dithering as his supporters rioted at the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
But Bragg’s prosecution is entirely different. The district attorney invented a novel theory of New York state business record law and argued—astonishingly—that Donald Trump had cheated in the election because he classified his hush money payments to two women he’d had sex with as “legal fees.” This was a case the Justice Department, the Federal Election Commission, and the U.S. attorney for Lower Manhattan had concluded was too weak to prosecute. But Bragg found a way. Although a jury found Trump guilty, the case is a stain on New York’s judicial system.
Other cities, including San Francisco and Los Angeles, have ousted progressive prosecutors whose approach to crime was similar to Bragg’s. Next year, the Manhattan DA will be up for reelection, with the Democratic primary in June. He deserves a serious challenger. So does New York.
Olivia Reingold has followed the Penny trial for The Free Press. You can read her articles here, here, and here. And watch her video report, co-produced with Tanya Lukyanova and Jana Kozlowski, “What Really Happened Between Daniel Penny and Jordan Neely.”
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