Daniel Penny breaks silence on subway chokehold case: 'I was in a very vulnerable position'
Just one day after being acquitted in the subway chokehold death of Jordan Neely, Marine veteran Daniel Penny shared his thoughts on the "vulnerable position" he said he was in.
Sitting down in an interview with Judge Jeanine Pirro on Fox News, Penny opened up about the chaotic moments during the fatal encounter, explaining what went through his mind.
"He was just threatening to kill people," Penny told Pirro. "He was threatening to go to jail forever, to go to jail for the rest of his life." Penny described how the situation escalated while he was trying to restrain Neely. "Now I'm on the ground with him, on my back, in a very vulnerable position. If I just would have let go..."
When asked why he felt vulnerable, Penny explained, "If I just let him go, I'm on my back. Now he can just turn around and start doing what he said to me."
"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," Penny said in a preview clip that aired Tuesday.
Penny, a 26-year-old former Marine, put Neely, a 30-year-old homeless man, in a minuteslong chokehold after Neely boarded a subway car acting erratically in May 2023, according to officials. Neely entered a subway car on an uptown F train at the Second Avenue stop, and was described by witnesses as yelling and moving erratically when Penny put Neely in a chokehold, officials said.
The case captured national attention, putting a spotlight on homelessness, severe mental illness, safety, and race.
The jury deliberated for more than 24 hours across five days before reaching the verdict.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg thanked the jury and vowed to respect their verdict: "The jury carefully deliberated for four days. They requested readbacks of testimony and asked for video footage to re-watch, as well as written definitions of the law. Their lengthy deliberation – and the totality of the facts and the evidence – underscored why this case was put in front of a jury of Mr. Penny's peers."
The jury in the Penny trial continued deliberations Monday over whether he committed criminally negligent homicide when he placed Neely in a chokehold on a subway car last year, after the jury was deadlocked on the more serious charge of manslaughter last week.
At the request of prosecutors on Friday, Judge Maxwell Wiley dismissed the second-degree manslaughter charge – which carried a maximum 15-year sentence – and directed the jury to turn to the lesser charge of criminally negligent homicide, which has a four-year maximum sentence. Neither crime has a minimum sentence. Penny pleaded not guilty to both charges.
The full interview is set to stream on Fox Nation on Wednesday.
ABC News' Kiara Alfonseca contributed to this report.
