Christopher F. Rufo

What the Daniel Penny acquittal means for America

A New York City courtroom Monday issued a stunning verdict: Daniel Penny, a veteran US marine who restrained a threatening homeless subway rider named Jordan Neely, who later died in police custody, is not guilty of negligent homicide. And the verdict was not just about Penny. Make no mistake: the Black Lives Matter era of “restorative justice” is over and the real spirit of justice is returning to America.

Penny’s trial captured public attention because it dramatically emblematized this critical cultural faultline. Most immediately, it symbolized a recurrent theme in New York City about the failures of law enforcement, and the appropriate response to criminality. But it was also a story that the Left sought to turn into a racial morality play by repeating the BLM playbook they applied to the death of George Floyd, to Trayvon Martin, to Michael Brown and countless others.

In this story, Daniel Penny (“the white man” in the loaded description of the prosecutor Dafna Yoran) was a racist white man, who cruelly hunted down and killed an innocent black man (a “Micheal Jackson impersonator”) who was peacefully riding the subway. In this telling, neither man is an individual; rather, each is a symbol of a system of racist white supremacy, organized around enacting violence on black bodies, for no reason, in the United States, and across the world.

The first imperative of restorative justice is to recognize this crucial ideological context; a point which Penny’s hyper-ideological prosecutor Dafna Yoran made explicit in a widely circulated video in which she boasted of reducing a felony murder charge in a previous trial to a manslaughter charge because she “felt sorry” for the trauma which the African-American killer had endured.

Daniel Penny, naturally, received no such considerations. In his case, the restorative task was to scapegoat “the white man” in the service of advancing a radical pro-crime agenda, consistent with defunding the police and turning the US criminal justice system into a politically organized system of justice comparable to the two-tier justice system that now exists in the UK.

This was a task that was pursued both inside and outside the courtroom. As with the trial of Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis following the death of George Floyd, professional activists were mobilized to protest on the street outside the trial with the intention to manipulate proceedings: witnesses reported that the shouting of the activists were audible inside the courtroom. But this time, the jury did not surrender to pressure.

Jordan Neely was, in fact, like George Floyd: both were violent criminals with a long record of antisocial behavioral problems who suffered from drug problems, and eventually died under troubling circumstances. But Derek Chauvin’s jury failed in its duty to separate the facts from ideological myths, and failed to stand up to political pressure. Chauvin was convicted by a jury frightened into complicity, and effectively thrown to the mob.

By contrast, in New York Monday, another conception of justice prevailed. Despite the activists ringing the courtroom, a hostile media chumming the waters, and a highly irregular legal procedure which saw the prosecution withdrawing one of Penny’s charges on Friday in order to avoid a mistrial and seek conviction on a lesser charge, the jurors retained their composure, and stuck to the facts and the law. Whatever fear they may have felt, they overcame it, and Penny was correctly found not guilty.

What will happen next? My own suspicion is that the verdict will not generate anything like the violence, riots, and disorder that followed the death of George Floyd. Americans are finished with the failed regime of the Left. The past four years have clarified what “social justice” really means and exhausted all remaining patience for granting activists the benefit of the doubt. The extraordinary shamelessness of Jordan Neely’s father in launching a civil suit against Penny over the death of a son he didn’t raise exemplifies the moral emptiness that was formerly, by many, mistaken for social justice.

In reality, “social justice” was never about justice: it was about the political subversion of justice to achieve pathological and ideological ends. The contrast with Penny himself could not be more striking. Penny is not merely not guilty, he is an unambiguous hero, who correctly understood and carried out his duty, with great courage, in a dangerous situation. He believed that it was his duty to use his training to protect women and children from a violent individual with a previous record of subway assault, and he was right to do so.

Today’s verdict marks the end of an era. BLM, which seemed unstoppable four years ago, is finished. Its activists are discredited, and its grip on the public imagination is broken. No doubt the violent spirit of the movement will seek to resurface in the future, but a brutal and stupid decade of moral and judicial corruption has come to a close.

With its passing, the opportunity returns to truly confront the problems that have plagued American cities for a generation. Penny’s heroism should never have been necessary because Jordan Neely should never have been riding that train. Neely himself was failed by BLM and the ideology of social justice, just as Penny was persecuted by it: it was also social justice which, from misguided ideas of compassion, stopped Neely from getting the treatment he needed.

The correct moral attitude, as well as the right social policy, is to dismantle this system entirely—in academia and media, where it generates its alibis, but above all in criminal justice. That means holding the attorneys responsible for this shameful prosecution accountable, returning to the system of “broken windows” policing that made New York under Giuliani the safest big city in America—and extending that system across the rest of the United States.

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This article was originally published in IM—1776.