The Daniel Penny Verdict Is A Signal That The BLM Era Is Over

“Daniel Penny, subway strangler!”

“If we don’t get no justice, they don’t get no peace!”

Those were the chants reportedly heard from inside the New York City courthouse where Daniel Penny sat waiting on Monday morning as jurors deliberated his fate. Outside, Black Lives Matter (BLM) protesters tried to bully the system into submission. Penny’s attorneys motioned for a mistrial, arguing that the chants amounted to jury intimidation. But Judge Maxwell Wiley denied the motion, saying he could “try to find” a room where jurors could deliberate out of earshot of the chants but was “not sure [he] could find one,” according to Matthew Russel Lee of the Inner City Press.

But despite the theatrics and threats from the protesters, the jury stood firm. On Monday, twelve New Yorkers refused to buckle under the weight of racial grievance politics. They acquitted Daniel Penny of criminally negligent homicide after the manslaughter charge had been dismissed on Friday. Perhaps this verdict serves as a bold sign that Americans have finally had enough of the BLM hysteria and mob mentality that demands guilt despite the facts so long as the accused is white.

After the May 2023 incident, leftists’ knee-jerk reaction was to convict Penny in the court of public opinion of murder before a trial. Such a response was deemed acceptable on the left. The same crowd that made George Floyd a martyr before any facts were established rushed to brand Penny a murderer. In their eyes, the narrative threshold for race-based violence was met: Penny was white and Neely was black.

As Jonathan S. Tobin, senior contributor to The Federalist, wrote, Neely was “anointed as the new George Floyd,” and “questions of whether Penny was right to restrain Neely or if he used inappropriate force to do so are merely sidebars to a broader narrative about American racism.”

As Tobin explained, when Floyd died, his lengthy criminal record and “the fact that his body was full of what might have been a lethal dose of fentanyl were dismissed as irrelevant.”

Similarly, Neely had an outstanding warrant for an alleged assault in 2021 that involved him attacking a woman on the subway, according to Fox News.

Floyd’s death was mistakenly characterized as “just one of countless incidents in which blacks were being slaughtered with impunity,” Tobin wrote. That’s exactly how BLM activists and leftists tried to portray the Neely case.

It’s the same tired, manipulative script leftists have parroted for a decade, but on Monday twelve New York City jurors rejected the pressure to convict Penny simply because it was an incident involving a white and black man and the assumption was supposed to be that the white man must be guilty. Instead, the jurors looked at the facts and determined that Penny, a Marine veteran, stepped in to protect the passengers on the train from a belligerent Neely, who was threatening to kill everyone.

“No justice, no peace” chants broke out outside the courtroom after the verdict was read, according to a reporter at the scene.

A woman who identified herself as the co-founder of BLM of Greater New York appeared to suggest violence would be the appropriate response to the verdict.

“And people who keep asking, ‘Are we going to riot? Are we going to protest? Is that what’s needed? Do glass have to break? Do cars have to burn for a black man to get justice in America?’ We can show out with peace. We can show out with facts. We can show with evidence and witness after witness. You give us nothing, and then you ask us to love this country.”

Hawk Newsom, co-founder of BLM of Greater New York, called for retaliation against white people.

“We need some black vigilantes. People wanna jump up and choke us and kill us for being loud? How about we do the same when they attempt to oppress us?”

Will BLM riot? Maybe.

But this time, the American people and justice system didn’t cave to their intimidation or threats of violence. It’s not to say other jurors won’t cave should a similar case arise. But it does show that society is rejecting the poisonous ideology that assumes guilt based on race no matter the facts.

No amount of threats or chanting should ever impact justice. America is fed up with being intimidated by angry activists.

Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist. Brianna graduated from Fordham University with a degree in International Political Economy. Her work has been featured on Newsmax, Fox News, Fox Business and RealClearPolitics. Follow Brianna on X: @briannalyman2