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Notes -
https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/12/us/jordan-neely-daniel-penny-new-york-subway-death-charge/index.html
Daniel Penny, a 24-year old Marine, turned himself to police after being charged with 2nd degree manslaughter for the killing of Jordan Neely. It looks like I was initially wrong. I said that drugs may have played a role given that the original NYTs story, which I replied to, from a week ago said that Neely had been choked for only 2-3 minutes and released and was unresponsive. The updated story is that he was choked out for much longer, as long as 15 minutes, which would have def. been lethal, and the video is pretty bad.
So retract my original argument in which I posit drugs played a role. This is why you should always wait until you have all the information before forming an opinion. I didn't think the story would blow up like it did. I just assumed it was some random altercation. The video is why it went so viral. I think Penny is not without some guilt here. Keeping someone in a choke for so long is going to end in death. It's likely Neely was not rendered unconscious near-instantly from blood loss to the brain, such as from a sleeper hold as I assumed from the original story (I assumed Penny put Neely in a hold, and then Neely went limp in 20-30 seconds and did not come back), but far worse, had been suffocated to death, like being held underwater because his windpipe was restricted. That's why he was flailing around. It would have been more humane had Penny just shot him although that would have carried a worse charge.
A second degree manslaughter conviction is not that bad. only max 15 years for killing someone, and with parole Penny may only spend 5 years, which is a pretty lenient sentence for killing a guy, and not even in self defense or accident. By comparison, Ross Ulbricht faces multiple life sentences despite not killing anyone. I cannot say Penny is not without some blame in this matter. But In Penny's defense, the police took too long to come, and despite Marine training he and his accomplices didn't know what else to do.
Something I am still struggling with - shouldn't a Marine know how to hold/disable somebody without killing him? I know next to nothing on Marine training, but I imagine there are situations where you want to capture the enemy soldier (e.g. to interrogate him later) and there must be ways to hold somebody relatively safely to oneself without choking them to death. Am I wrong? Also, being a Marine, he should have known what a long chokehold would do to a person. Did he mean to kill the guy? If yes, did he not foresee killing a guy in public in this fashion - after he is clearly subdued already and not presenting clear and present danger - would end up in serious charges, especially in New York? How did he expect this would end up?
Speaking as someone with an extensive combat sports background, this idea that training should have helped him is highly dubious. I'm sure he was given some training, but probably never used it in real life, and hasn't kept up with it. Indeed, it probably makes things worse. He kept trying to do the thing he was trained to do, but kept getting it wrong, which is made very difficult by being in real life (not on a mat) and battling a live opponent (who also probably was giving off odors that made him less able to focus).
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I have basically no 1st hand knowledge on the subject, but any time I hear from people who have actual knowledge of combat (e.g. mixed martial artists or law enforcement), it seems to me that humans are very fragile creatures where the line between merely stopping an oppositional person with force and killing them is extremely fine. I'm sure there are techniques that maximize the chances of someone surviving when holding/disabling them, but the chaotic nature of a physical altercation makes it so that there's a lot of variance and unpredictability in the outcome. So my thinking is that it's very possible that he tried his best to disable him without killing him but failed at that endeavor, for whatever reason. Whether that was due to reckless negligence is up to the courts to decide, I suppose.
Put more precisely, the line between incapacitation and killing is very fine. People can stop an action of their own volition whenever they want. It's making them stop against their will that's fraught.
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that's what I was thinking too. I assume 'restraining someone safely' would be covered in basic training , especially when the assailant is not armed and does not seem particularly strong
Functionally it ends up through pain compliance and this seems to be a case where that wouldn't work.
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Jesus, he used a chokehold, not a glock. How much softer can you get?
We back to "de-escalation training"?
Any chokehold is the barehanded equivalent of a glock.
Theirs a reason I constantly bitch about guys who refuse to tap because they have testosterone poisoning and that refs full body throw themselves onto the ground and get within 8 inches of your face when you are getting choked, and it's because it goes from a fun sporting competition to a negligent murder in about 30 seconds.
I don't expect this dude to do a kimura or some shit, but a 15 minute choke is a bit much.
And why do you think that is even possible, or happened?
You're in a match. You sink a RNC. How long can you hold it before your arms burn out? Fifteen minutes?
Yeah? Unless your rotator cuff is fucked or you are weak as shit, you can hold an rnc forever. It's the easiest hold to hold, its why getting one locked in right should be an instant tap.
You can's struggle against an rnc once it is locked in because your point of leverage is your squishy trachea area, the best you can do is try to pull their hands off their own arms get a finger loose, but if it is locked in you have shitty leverage for that also.
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A lot. There are different ways to hold people. Source: 15 years of martial arts training. I don't claim I would have done better in this situation (one reason I moved from California is to reduce the chance to ever find myself in such a situation) but I know there are other ways than chocking the daylights out of a person. That's why I am wondering why he decided to do what he did.
I mean, he probably convened a meeting of ethics professors, focus grouped the results a bit, got a supreme court ruling and a blessing from the pope before confronting the maniac.
You've got fifteen years of martial arts training? What's the better control position to back control? What's the least damaging incapacitation you can do to a person?
Should he have gone for the Kimura and torn Neely's shoulder off? Snapped his elbows off backward? Or just punched him in the head repeatedly?
It's hard to answer such generics, there could be a number of ways depending on the situation. But yes, I think it'd be better even if he broke his shoulder or punched him out (though this is a risky one too - people may react wildly different to being punched, including possible fatal injuries) than killing him. If it were somewhere in deep self-defense friendly red state, then the calculation would be different, but in New York, with races being as they are, you're pretty much guaranteed very vigorous and politicized prosecution. This is also a component of safety - what happens after. Again, I am not saying I know the solution for this, it would be stupid for me not being there, not seeing it, to make any suggestions. It's just the choice that actually happened looks strange to me, and I wonder why was it made. No amount of low-effort mockery "yes, he should have filed a petition to Supreme Court!" is going to answer this. I don't expect anybody to know the answers, but maybe at least some higher effort thoughts than that.
It's not, you just refuse to because the answer is obvious and inconvenient. The RNC is the lowest risk to both parties. It does not sacrifice control like an armbar, it does not require coming to striking distance like mount. Back control is bar none the best control position and the RNC is the absolute least damaging and risky option to incapacitate someone.
This is the absolute minimum force possible that produces incapacity without injury in the wild majority of cases. 99%, with decimals to ten or so places.
If the RNC is not justified, then no violence is justified. The critique of "well why didn't he try some other nonspecific technique which from the keyboard I think might have had a better result after the fact?" is ridiculous.
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Pretty unnecessary response imo.
I don’t especially care about this incident anymore than I care about any of the other daily killings in NYC, but even maintaining the same hold without putting the one hand behind the head (which is what causes the downward pressure on the bloodflow) would have been both easier and less lethal. Not even saying he should have done that in the situation if the guy was violent, but if all he wanted to do was restrain him (as opposed to knock him out and dip) then almost any way of holding someone other than the really specific RNC position is less lethal.
This is either wildly wrong or extremely pedantic. And less lethal for who exactly?
…it isn’t though? Fitting your hand behind the back of somebody’s head and pushing down isn’t a natural, easy-to-fall-into movement - you might have to literally force your hand up in between their body and yours while they’re struggling - and that move is specifically what causes the blood flow to cut off. Almost every other form of back control doesn’t have that immediate risk because the RNC isn’t back control, it’s a submission. Even just take the same hand and use it to pin his arm to his body and you have a movement both less dangerous and more natural for beginners, whereas as the RNC isn’t something people know intuitively without being taught.
As for your comment about lethality, in every conversation I’d had about this event, including my comment above, I’ve very explicitly said I’m not condemning the use of lethal force, which may have literally been necessary if the guy was attacking him or somebody else on the train. I’m disagreeing with the people who are for some reason arguing that choking someone out for a long ass time doesn’t have obviously lethal potential. And if it turns out the guy wasn’t attacking anyone, for better or for worse you don’t get to knock people out just for being awful.
This is bogus.
"No, you can't carry a gun for self defense, just use martial arts"
:guy gets punched, hits head, dies:
"He should have known the risk hitting someone, he should totally have used something less damaging"
:guy gets choked, dies:
"Obviously lethal, should have used some other secret squirrel thing that only exists in the keyboard warrior's head"
:guy gets tased, dies:
" Yeah, 'less than lethal' means lethal, should have known that this could happen, deploying a taser is lethal force!"
:Guy gets pepper sprayed, dies:
"Why are people allowed to carry obviously lethal pepper spray"?
Strange how there are exactly zero responsible and reasonable uses of force, at least after the fact if something goes badly and someone dies. All the good uses of force exist.......mostly in the minds of critics.
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Maybe he wanted to just knock him out as opposed to restrain him for an indeterminate amount of time?. Being so close to a Vagrant like Neely mustn't be very fun.
Yeah I was gonna say actually knocking him out and withdrawing quickly could have made sense, if the guy was attacking him at least. If you can’t land it perfectly just applying sustained pressure to the throat for a long time is dicier though. And if the guy doesn’t turn out to have attacked anyone, you can’t just knock someone out for being really awful to be around.
How do you knock someone out?
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Marines are trained to kill though. That's the whole point. They're shock troops, not a police force.
You will be taught how to disable someone without killing them, but in a way that maximizes your safety and doesn't really take into account that you'll be fighting some drug ridden mentally ill lowlife but an actual enemy combattant.
Yes, that's one of the things they are trained to do. But I really hope that's not the only thing they are trained to do. Knowing when it is appropriate and not appropriate to kill should have been part of it too.
How does it make any difference? I'm sure if you choke an enemy combatant for 15 minutes he'd die just as well as a mentally ill lowlife. Anybody would. That's what I don't understand - he knew what would happen and he must have had other options. Why did he choose this one?
Why are you exactly hoping for this?
Because an army of mindless psychopathic murderers is a bad way to conduct wars. And releasing them into society when they're done service would be even worse.
This is a legitimate unsolved problem.
It was already pretty hard to train people to be ready to kill and not just ready to boast at the enemy with automatic weapons. Training them back into being normal citizens is something I'm not sure to even be possible.
Not about to say the average jarhead can't be integrated back into society, but fucking with him is a deadly business and likely always will be. Doesn't matter what the law says.
Why not? They are not killing any person they encounter at random. They are killing who they are ordered, when they are ordered, and in a manner they are ordered. Otherwise they're not an army, they are a horde of psychos. Why would it be impossible to order them not to kill civilians?
As I understand, the wacko in question did not even pose an imminent danger - certainly not to the Marine, but also not to anybody else. He disturbed the peace, was stirring shit up and was running his mouth, but he was not actively trying to murder anyone, and especially not Penny. So it's hardly "fucking with him".
Because that's not how it works in reality.
In 1947, Brigadier General S. L. A. Marshall published Men Against FIre: The Problem of Battle Command, arguably one of the most influential publications in military psychology. In it, he makes the now infamous "ratio of fire" claim that fewer than 25% of men in combat actually fired their weapons at the enemy. His figures are contested, but the finding itself has been independently reproduced by multiple studies performed by other armies over multiple centuries. And remember we are talking about men that were drilled into operating their weapons and are in mortal danger.
The reason for this remains the object of intense debate, but Marshall most definitely succeeded in convincing people to look into methods of increasing this ratio.
By 1950 and Korea the US Army had started efforts to use B. F. Skinner's newly discovered conditioning techniques to do so.
One of the most famous changes wrought by these programs was the use of human silhouette instead of bullseye targets during basic training as one such conditioning tweak. But it is also one of the least successful.
The increase in the availability of crew served weapons, which provide a sociological pressure to the individual soldier, and the widespread use of artillery which allows for the reduction of the enemy to an item on a map did a lot more to increase the ratio. All these factors and more made Korea an important learning experience for this venture and all the lessons learned would be applied to the extreme in the next war.
VIetnam would see these techniques perfected, and used with great effect.
Desensitization is of course the name of the game here, the level of bloodthirsty rhetoric and celebration of killing in a recruits training was significantly increased compared to Korea and even more significantly so compared to the world wars. Training videos and lectures full of gory details and celebration of the mutilation of the enemy were commonplace.
Conditioning was also greatly employed, to produce reaction without thought. While previously a marksmanship course would have you take a prescribed position while calmly shooting at stationary targets, a similar course for Vietnam would have you standing in a foxhole, wearing full gear, waiting anxiously for a moving target to pop up at random and only allow you a few moments to shoot. That same target producing a satisfying sound when dispatched correctly.
A great emphasis was placed on realism, they went as far as making mock Vietnamese villages complete with livestock and villagers to have the recruits patrol and do mock missions within. All to turn the destruction of the enemy into a reflex.
Of course all this conditioning comes at a cost. The mental restraints we have against killing are there for a reason, and many argue that the atrocities committed against Vietnamese civilians as well as the widespread psychatric issues associated with Vietnam vets are consequences of such conditioning.
This is all to say that the idea that destroying your fellow man as something that can be simply be turned on and off and controlled with individual reason is far from an accurate picture.
The distance between an effective soldier and what you term psychopathy is much smaller than I think you realize.
This is most probably what the law cares about. But you're not hearing me if you think that is what matters. Whether it is true or not.
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They are of course trained for other combat activities, and to operate equipment, and survive in the field, and all sorts of other things. They are not much trained in nonlethal combat, occupation enforcement, or policing. They are not meant to be used for that purpose.
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