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Days after Daniel Penny was acquitted in the chokehold death of Jordan Neely, he is set to attend an Army-Navy football game Saturday as a guest of Vice President-elect JD Vance.
Vance said that Penny had accepted his invite to the game in a post on X on Friday morning.
“Daniel’s a good guy, and New York’s mob district attorney tried to ruin his life for having a backbone,” Vance wrote. “I’m grateful he accepted my invitation and hope he’s able to have fun and appreciate how much his fellow citizens admire his courage.”
Like others on the political right, Vance hailed Penny as a good Samaritan who helped his fellow citizens by confronting a potentially dangerous situation. Neely, a former Michael Jackson impersonator with a history of mental illness, died after Penny restrained him by the neck for an extended period of time during an encounter on the New York City subway in 2023. Penny argued that he meant to restrain Neely only until police arrived and did not intend to harm him. A New York City medical examiner ruled that Neely died from compression to his neck as a result of the chokehold.
A jury cleared Penny of criminally negligent homicide in Neely’s death Monday after failing to come to an agreement on a charge of second-degree manslaughter, which a judge then dismissed.
Penny’s ascension to folk hero status on the right is not unlike the support that Kyle Rittenhouse gained among conservatives after fatally shooting two people during a Black Lives Matter protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in 2020. Rittenhouse was acquitted of homicide charges in the case, and Donald Trump met with Rittenhouse afterward, praising him as “really a nice young man.”
There are vast differences in the details of each case, but the lionization of Penny on the right coincides with the narrative about rising crime across the country, especially in urban areas like New York City. National data crime data, however, indicates the opposite.