The ugliest answer here is almost certainly the truest: Penny is white and Neely is black, and the central idea that animates woke DAs like Bragg (and the leftist legislators who’ve utterly eroded our criminal justice system) is that black people are dying in an epidemic of white violence.

After Daniel Penny, a white subway passenger, subdued and choked a menacing Black homeless man, Jordan Neely, to death last year on a Manhattan train, two weeks passed before Penny was arrested.

Daniel Penny returned to a Manhattan courthouse this morning for opening statements in his manslaughter trial for the death of Jordan Neely, an erratic homeless man he placed in a chokehold during an outburst on the subway.

The chaotic bodycam footage, which captured two police officers confirming that an unconscious Neely still had a pulse when they arrived at Fulton Station on May 1, 2023, was shown to jurors in Penny’s manslaughter trial in Manhattan Supreme Court.