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The identity of the man who choked Jordan Neely on the NYC subway has been made public.
The man now gets to become the center of a media firestorm, and will certainly be subjected to credible threats, to say nothing of the likelihood that the activists in charge of Manhattan’s criminal justice system will indict him. If he ever gets to live a normal life again, it certainly won’t be in New York, and probably not in any urban blue-heavy environment in this country. Future prospective employers will know him as the guy who murdered a defenseless man and beloved Michael Jackson impersonator who was experiencing homelessness and needed help. This will be how he’ll be perceived by a substantial number of important people who will have the power to determine important things about the future of his life, regardless of any legal outcomes for him, favorable or otherwise.
I told the story previously of how I was assaulted on public transit by a mentally-ill black lowlife, and how I was very close to being severely injured and nobody in the vicinity would have been able nor willing to stop it from happening. (Sorry, the comment search functions both here and on Reddit are terrible, such that it would be too much work for me to track down that comment thread.) Since posting that story, a very similar situation happened to me yet again - with a predictably similar antagonist - and once again, I was sickened and humiliated not only by the actions of the schizophrenic loser who accosted me, and by my relative inability to effectively defend myself if the guy had started attacking me, but also by the inaction of the other grown men standing nearby. Without telling the whole story, I ended up in that position because I attempted to stop the lunatic from harassing a different guy, and then that guy stood around and watched the assailant menace me and did not intervene in any way.
I have fantasized about doing exactly what Daniel Penny - the NYC subway hero - did. Except for in my fantasies, I didn’t unintentionally end the man’s life due to a tragic and unforeseen accident; I just kicked the absolute shit out of him, taking him by surprise and beating him within an inch of his life, or stabbing him before he could get a hand in me. These fantasies are just that: unrealistic power fantasies, the stuff I would do if I were a much stronger, taller, more physically-powerful, more experienced with interpersonal violence than I actually am. I’ve never been in a proper fistfight, and even if I knew how to properly defend myself, in both this situation and the previous one, I allowed the guy to close distance on me and get into an advantageous position, such that they had me right where they wanted me.
I’ve stewed and ideated about what I could have done differently, why I’m a grown man who let myself be treated like a pathetic plaything by individuals who are my social and biological inferiors in every imaginable way except for that I’m diminutive and even-tempered while they’re large, high-testosterone, and well-acquainted with violence because it’s literally the only tool in their toolbox.
I’ve also thought about what would have been the consequences for me if somehow I really had been able to put these guys in their place and seriously injure or kill them. I’ve imagined being at trial - a highly-publicized media shitstorm of a trial, given the demographics involved - and having to answer questions that are designed to get me to hang myself with their rope. I’ve thought about what would happen if they found my posts on The Motte. If they asked me, “Are you glad that Mr. Schizo is dead?” How could I credibly answer “no, this is a terrible tragedy, I never wanted to take someone’s life” when I’ve got a backlog of posts here saying explicitly that I believe that schizophrenic street criminals’ lives have no value whatsoever and that the world would be better if all of them were summarily rounded up and sent to gulags or executed? If they were to ask me “did you do this because Mr. Schizo is black”, no matter how sincerely I would answer “no, it’s because he was attacking me”, how can I be confident that they won’t drag up all my posts here and paint me as a “hate criminal”?
I have no idea how racially-aware Daniel Penny is. I have no clue if he has similar opinions about the scourge of worthless criminal crazies and what to do about them, and I have no reason to assume that his lawyers are lying when they say that he’s devastated that Jordan Neely died, that Mr. Penny never wanted nor foresaw this outcome, etc. It’s very easy for me to say “I’m glad Jordan Neely is dead, you did the world a favor, this was a wonderful thing you did and you shouldn’t feel an ounce of guilt or sadness about it”, but in the actual event that I did what Mr. Penny did, I probably would be pretty shaken-up about it. For most people, taking a life - especially when you hadn’t planned to - is probably pretty psychologically destabilizing, even if it was totally necessary and justified.
Still, though, what if Penny thinks the same way I do about the homeless population? What if he truly does believe, as I do, that Jordan Neely was human garbage who had no redeeming value, and that his death is a great boon to the entire population of NYC? He can’t say that in court, even if it’s true. He would be pilloried and convicted of manslaughter and sent to prison. His only legal hope is to vociferously insist that Neely’s death is a tragedy, that he would never have done what he did if he could have foreseen that it would result in a death, that he is 100% innocent of the crime of racial consciousness or animus toward the experiencing-homelessness population. His future depends on his ability to persuasively perform colorblind egalitarian liberalism, regardless of whether or not he believes in it or not.
Outside of the edgy dissident-right spaces I frequent, every other commentator, even putatively conservative ones, are doing the expected throat-clearing about how Neely’s death is a tragedy, that we all wish he “could have gotten the help he needed”, etc. If anyone believes, as I do, that the first step to saving our civilization is for tens of thousands of people to pull a Daniel Penny on their local subway-screaming bum, they’re sure not saying it out loud. The veil of self-censorship and paying homage to liberal pieties will persist no matter what happens to Daniel Penny, and nobody will get the public catharsis of hearing a powerful or important person say out loud that Jordan Neely’s death was a good thing and we need more of it. Those who do say something like that out loud better hope and pray that they’re never thrust into a courtroom and asked to defend those opinions under oath; the defense stand is no place for hard-nosed honesty, and neither is our society.
Saying that society should recognize that these people are garbage and not give a damn about them is a position that can only be taken if one is very selective about whom this categorization refers to, and this selectivity is why activists protest and call opinions such as yours inherently racist, or classist, or whatever. When Mr. Penny decided to put Mr. Neely in a chokehold, his information was limited to what he could tell from the approximately 30 seconds or whatever it was that Penny observed him in public. He didn't have a copy of the guy's criminal record to know that he was a general homeless scofflaw who had been arrested 42 times previously, mostly for turnstile jumping and public drunkenness but at least four times for assault. All he knew was that the guy was ranting and raving about being hungry and not caring if he went to jail and that this behavior made some (most?) people around him uncomfortable so he decided to do something about it, or, more accurately, assist in a group effort to do something about it.
Giving him a free pass on this seems reasonable enough, but only because we have the additional context that this was a black, homeless, schizo, ne'er do well. Suppose, on the other hand, a white, middle-class, student at a prestigious university (possibly your son) got drunk and started making a scene on public transit. A group of black passengers were made uncomfortable by his behavior and the young man died after on of these passengers put him in a choke hold. When I was in my early 20s being drunk, loud, and obnoxious on public transit was a regular occurrence, as we could go to the club in the city on 50 cent drink night without having to drive or park. Just a few years ago a friend of mine went into a similar rant about Taco Bell on the train back to the hotel after the 2018 ACC Championship Game in Charlotte. And if the counterargument is that Neely was obviously a dangerous hobo then that just confirms the suspicions of all the social justice do-gooders that you expect the rules to be different for certain people, and we're supposed to expect people to be able to tell the difference based on the way a guy's dressed or whether we think he's mentally ill or homeless or, mast damningly, whether he's white.
I remember a similar storyline back when black guys getting shot by cops was in the news more often, and most of the conservatives I know kept pointing out that one has an obligation to obey when a police officer tells you to do something. As a guy in his '30s this seemed reasonable, until I looked back at my own life and realized that by these people's standards I'd have been dead a long time ago. Yes, I agree generally with the argument that if a police officer decides to arrest you then what happens afterward happens on his terms, not yours, and if you have a problem with that you can bring it up in court. On the other hand, any teenager who is told to stop by police is going to start running. I wasn't a bad kid by a long-shot—I only got two write-ups in four years of high school, and one was for a class cut—but I still liked to occasionally indulge in the kind of mischief kids indulge in, like drinking in woods of indeterminate ownership or stealing pumpkins from farm fields and shit like that, and this would sometimes end with a fat, black cop chasing a bunch of spry kids through fields and woods. I once got away because I crawled under a fence that the guy couldn't fit under. If we took these statements about a duty of compliance to their logical conclusion, the officer had every right to shoot me. After all, I had clearly committed a crime, ignored his orders and fled. And it was clear that he wasn't going to catch me unless he could stop me from a distance. And this was for the same type of "quality of life" shit a lot of law and order types are complaining about. How would you like it if property you paid for was being used without permission by people on quads and dirt bikes during the day, cutting trails you don't want, contributing to erosion, and scaring away huntable animals, and then at night the same kids would come back and build fires and leve beer cans and fast food wrappers everywhere? People in rural areas have gotten in trouble for putting up tripwires and spike strips and other kinds of booby traps to keep people from trespassing, and while there's some pushback it's understandable that parents get pissed when criminal trespass results in serious premeditated injury. If we develop standards they have to apply to everybody, and few people realize what the implications of this would be.
Do you think most people would be capable of using that 30 seconds of observation to arrive at an educated guess regarding Mr. Neeley's criminal history that would line up fairly accurately with his actual criminal history? If so, are they morally obligated to register that prediction as purely prejudicial and push it to the back of their mind, internally insisting to themselves that it has no predictive value?
Even if it has predictive value I don't see what the point is. Either people causing disruptions that make the general public do so at their own risk of consequences up to and including death if anyone feels the least bit threatened or they don't. Even if someone can make an accurate predication about another person's criminal and mental health history we have to establish criteria under which he can operate. Do we really want to go down the road of defining how many arrests it takes before someone is legally considered scum and forfeits basic civil rights most of us enjoy? And what happens if someone's wrong? If Neely was really just a normal dude dealing with some personal problems that expressed themselves in an unfortunate way, do we then bring the hammer down on Penny for wrongfully assuming he was some homeless wino? If not, then do we just give everyone the benefit of the doubt and lose the distinction entirely? When dealing with matters involving human life I don't know if this is a road we want to go down.
YES. Is this actually supposed to be a difficult question?
I don't think you've really thought about it if you consider such a question to be obvious.
Alright, look, my totally-serious well-considered answer is something like this: every civilization in history, before the last century or so, had an understanding that there are irredeemably useless and/or dangerous people, and found a way to dispose of them. I am not suggesting that every society in history has employed an optimal and reasonable solution to the existence of these people, nor am I suggesting that all imaginable future societies will take approaches that I would consider acceptable.
The hypothetical dystopian panopticon that arrests or punished normal citizens hundreds of times a month for utterly innocuous behavior is not a society I’d want to live in. But we have to ask ourselves: how likely is such a nightmare scenario to become reality? Isn’t it much more likely that a future society will find a middle ground somewhere in between the maximally-tolerant legal regime advocated by today’s progressive elite on the one hand, and the maximally-draconian fever dream which you may imagine the hard-right is capable of implementing?
Surely the answer to “how many arrests does it take before we declare somebody scum and he loses his basically civil rights” has some answer that you would consider reasonable? If there were a guy who’d been arrested 4,000 times, and all of them were for things you and I would both agree are antisocial and destructive, that’s someone that it’s necessary to do something about… right?
Every civilization in history, before the last century or so, was also in many many ways a really bad place to live compared to the modern West. I do not think that these two things are completely unrelated.
I totally reject this reading of history, which is probably the main reason why you and I disagree so strongly. I accept the reality of technological/medical advancement, but reject the narrative of monotonic societal/cultural improvement. I don’t think that most societies before a century ago were “really bad places to live”, especially if you weren’t a lunatic or a criminal.
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Have you MET the "Karens"? They'd think the ticket machine in Demolition Man was the greatest thing ever. And there's a lot of them and many have nothing better to do than to go to city council meetings.
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Every society had such people and was confronted with such problems. Some of them were ruled by such people and it lead to their collapse. Great Britain exiled a bunch of them to Australia and Appalachia, or just executed them. Notably its crime rate remained pretty high by modern standards, because crime is more complicated than "just kill the bad people."
I can't put a number on that with any confidence, just like you can't put a number on your nightmare scenario. I can at least say for sure that multiple powerful countries have turned into that society in the past 100 years, they've committed (and continue to commit) terrible atrocities. I can also say that worries about overbearing government aren't totally one-sided: There's plenty of right-coded worry about tyrannical and controlling governments (just look at of the discourse around covid, masks, and vaccines, or more recently 15 minute cities).
No number of arrests means that someone should lose all their civil rights. For one, as soon as you establish such a number, I think you immediately try to argue it down to be "1" or to "well they did something that isn't actually violent but is vaguely antisocial" because that's what is actually required for you to be satisfied. But also, why is one person being arrested 4,000 times? If it's because there's not actually any evidence they've committed a crime, then that sounds like the police are either incompetent or harassing the guy. If it's because he is convicted and then gets released, then that shouldn't be the case, but putting a convicted criminal in prison for longer does not require revoking civil rights.
Obviously it sucks to be victimized on the street with nothing you can do about it. It also sucks to be tackled and arrested by a power-mad cop with nothing you can do about it, or attacked on the street by a vigilante who got you confused for someone else. I's not like your (honestly, insane) idea of "execute them all" is a solution anyway, because if you could implement it you could more easily implement actually reasonable reforms.
I'm fairly certain it does, unless your entire conception of civil rights is purely procedural.
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Like most things, criminality is partly heritable. Some people, when given freedom choose to defect against others.
Executing the most violent criminals before they reproduce over many thousands of years is artificial selection for civilisation.
You would expect it to increase the proportion of law abiding genes.
There are pretty big population difference is crime. Has anyone looked at historical time and percentage of executions for crime vs present day rates?
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Yes? The damage to society, the ‘tragedy’, is clearly greater if an upstanding citizen dies in the chokehold than a drug-addicted homeless criminal. If you drive drunk and kill somebody the punishment is far more severe than if you just drive drunk.
Then the principle is wholly untenable. You may have edge cases like this where someone acts and you "get lucky" in a manner of speaking, but you're not going to encourage this kind of vigilantism if it requires holding the vigilante strictly liable for knowing the personal history of his target.
I am only holding people liable for the consequences of their actions. If there was minimal or no damage to society, there should not be punishment.
I guess it comes down to a preferrence: which is more important, guilty mind or guilty act?
To stretch our positions to the extreme, in total Guiltmind, a thoughtcrime would be sufficient for prison, while in total Guiltact, the sentence for accidental discharging of a firearm resulting in death would be the same as for a premeditated murder. In Guiltmind, both drunk drivers are equally guilty, and in Guiltact, one is innocent and the other guilty. Guiltact cares if the guy you just choked on the subway was an honors student or literally Hitler. Guiltmind just wants to know what you thought at the time.
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As I understand OP, his/her answer is no, which is why efforts to justify Penny's behavior by appealing to Neeley's record are misguided. If Penny's actions were justified -- and I don't have enough details to say one way or the other -- they can only be justified based on what he knew at the time. Hence,
People v. Minifie, 13 Cal. 4th 1055, 1068 (1996) (emphasis in original)
Edit: Note, btw, that that legal rule is based on the premise that one who kills an innocent "good" person in those circumstances lacks a criminal state of mind, ie, is not morally culpable.
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