“I’ll take a million court appearances and people calling me names and people hating me, just to keep one of those people from getting hurt or killed,” Daniel Penny told Fox News in a clip that aired Tuesday, a day after the verdict.
An anonymous Manhattan jury cleared Penny of a criminally negligent homicide charge in the death of Jordan Neely, 30. The jury had deadlocked last week on a more serious manslaughter charge, which was dismissed.
Penny, who served four years in the Marines, put Neely in a chokehold for about six minutes after Neely had an outburst that frightened riders on a subway car on May 1, 2023.
In his first extensive comments since the trial began, Penny told Fox News host Jeanine Pirro that he's “not a confrontational person.” But he said he wouldn't have been able to live with “the guilt I would have felt if someone did get hurt, if he did do what he was threatening to do."
Penny told Pirro that he was in a “very vulnerable position” as he restrained Neely on the subway floor.
“If I just let him go, I'm on my back now, he could just turn around and start doing what he said to me ... killing, hurting," Penny said in the clips, aired ahead of the planned release of the full interview Wednesday on the Fox Nation streaming service.
Penny, 26, also criticized city officials as “self-serving,” suggesting that they were refusing to scrutinize their own roles in the conditions that led to his encounter with Neely.
“These are their policies that clearly have not worked,” Penny said. But, he added, “their egos are too big just to admit that they’re wrong.”
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, a Democrat whose office brought the case, said after the verdict that prosecutors “followed the facts and the evidence from beginning to end.” His office had no further comment Tuesday.
