Judge in Daniel Penny trial tells jury to keep deliberating after they say they are deadlocked

A judge ordered jurors Friday to keep deliberating after they said they were deadlocked in the trial of Daniel Penny, the man accused of manslaughter in the May 2023 chokehold death of Jordan Neely.

The jury said it could not come to a unanimous decision on the top charge of manslaughter. Penny is also charged with criminally negligent homicide. He has pleaded not guilty.

Jurors, who have been deliberating since Tuesday afternoon, sent a note to Judge Maxwell Wiley on Friday morning stating that they have not been able to agree on a verdict for the manslaughter charge. Before they began deliberations, Wiley told the jury that it must come to a unanimous decision on that charge before it can be allowed to consider the lesser charge of criminally negligent homicide. They were also instructed to decide whether Penny’s actions caused Neely’s death and, if so, whether he had acted recklessly and in an unjustified manner.

Outside the presence of the jury, Thomas Kenniff, one of Penny’s attorneys, asked that the judge declare a mistrial.

“The jury has been deliberating for roughly 20 hours over four days in what is, in many ways, a factually uncomplicated case,” Kenniff told the judge. “We are concerned that the giving of the Allen charge under these circumstances will be coercive.”

An Allen charge instructs a deadlocked jury to continue trying to reach a unanimous verdict.

Dafna Yoran, an assistant prosecutor with the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, disagreed and asked Wiley to give the jurors the Allen charge. She said that the note from the jury was the first indication that they had been in a disagreement.

During deliberations, jurors asked to rewatch bystander videos of Penny restraining Neely, responding officers’ body camera videos and video of Penny’s subsequent interview with two police detectives at a precinct. They also asked to rehear the medical examiner’s testimony about issuing a death certificate before Neely’s full toxicology reports were completed. They also asked for the judge to read back the definitions of recklessness and criminal negligence and to have the definitions in writing.

Wiley said he believed he had to give the jurors the Allen charge and said he disagreed with Kenniff that the case was not factually complicated.

“The tenor of the note is this is an extremely conscientious jury who is going about things in a very systematic way,” he said, referring to the note that the jury sent Friday morning. “It is not time to declare a mistrial.”

After the jurors were called back into the courtroom, Wiley told them that he did not want them to violate their consciences.

“I urge each of you to make every possible effort to arrive at a just verdict,” he said.

Penny, a former Marine and architecture student, had been coming from class and was on his way to the gym on the afternoon of May 1, 2023, when he encountered an erratic Neely on a New York City subway train.

Neely, a former Michael Jackson impersonator, threw his jacket to the ground and loudly ranted about being hungry, thirsty and not caring about whether he died or went back to jail when he boarded the train, witnesses have testified. Penny put him in a chokehold that prosecutors said lasted six minutes and continued after the uptown F train arrived at its next stop, the Broadway-Lafayette station. Neely, 30, was homeless and had a history of mental illness. At the time of his death, he had synthetic marijuana — known as K2 — in his system.

Penny and his attorneys have said that he did not intend to harm Neely, only to restrain him until police arrived. His attorneys, Kenniff and Steven Rasier, also disputed the cause of Neely’s death. A city medical examiner found that Neely died from compression to his neck as a result of the chokehold. A forensic pathologist hired by the defense testified that Neely died from the combined effects of sickle cell crisis, synthetic marijuana, schizophrenia and the struggle from being in Penny’s restraint. But the medical examiner who performed the autopsy on Neely testified that she did not believe there were any alternative reasonable explanations for Neely’s death.

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com

EMEA Tribune is not involved in this news article, it is taken from our partners and or from the News Agencies. Copyright and Credit go to the News Agencies, email news@emeatribune.com Follow our WhatsApp verified Channel