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Witness to Jordan Neely chokehold death calls Daniel Penny a 'hero'Whoops, wrong link, not sure how that happened. Lets try again.
Witness to Jordan Neely chokehold death calls Daniel Penny a 'hero'
I do wonder if words can do justice with how threatening Neely was being on that train. I'm reminded of the Always Sunny bit about "the implication".
Probably doesn't matter that much for general conversations. I'm sure it'll matter legally, but when we're having the ethical discussion about it, it's going to just keep coming back to some people thinking that you shouldn't ever get violent with a belligerent vagrant that has not yet initiated any physical force and others not caring what happens to belligerent vagrants. This probably isn't a bridgeable divide and most of the nuance is intellectual window-dressing. Yes, it would be best if the person doing the restraining exercise somewhat more caution than choking a guy to death. Yes, it's also true that restraining someone will not be completely safe for the restrainee, particularly when they're likely high as a kite and experiencing excited delirium. Neither of those points really moves the needle from people's gut responses.
"Belligerent" essentially means "threatening to initiate physical force".
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I think it is likely that the Internet disproportionately represents people who look on the matter without nuance because such people are the most likely to write commentary about it. I would like to think that in reality, there is a large number of people who can think about the matter in a nuanced way. I can, and I can easily think of a number of people whom I know in person who also could.
"Nuance" in this case is a trick. It's a way to map a yes-or-no, guilty or not-guilty question onto a spectrum such that "guilty" is all but one of the endpoints and "not guilty" is the excluded endpoint. Then demand no one take the endpoint positions because they're not nuanced. Then all the acceptable positions get to map back to "guilty".
That is, once you're talking about "nuance", you've decided Penny is guilty and you're only talking about his level of guilt.
No, when I say nuance I mean actual nuance, not what you are talking about.
I can think about this matter with actual nuance, and I am sure that several people I know in real life also can.
I can imagine more information coming in about what happened and, based on that information, deciding that Penny is not guilty of anything at all. That is, I have not ruled out deciding that Penny is guilty of nothing. Based on the information I have seen so far I think it is likely that he is at least slightly guilty in the sense of being guility of using too much force, but I can imagine more information changing my mind about that.
The position described by The_Nybbler accounts for your type of "actual nuance".
To put my spin on it, I think it's important to recognize ones own biases and contextualize ones own thinking process. That doesn't mean our views and opinions stop being relevant or valuable, as much as they ever were. In fact, recognizing what we think and how we likely came to think it changes very little.
But on the flipside, recognizing that our minds are, most of the time, just playing third rate magician parlor tricks does wonders to help oneself realize that we are in fact not bending the laws of physics and we can in fact not read minds. We knew the card drawn was going to be the ace of spades because every card in the deck was the ace of spades because we, at some point, through whatever process, chose that deck to perform with.
To put that in context, here's your deck:
The parameters of your 'nuance' are not accidental. They are not tethered to some objective metric linked to the fabric of reality. They are chosen by you. Now why did you choose them? Do you think it is likely Neely was throwing trash at people? I don't.
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It should matter, though. As @Rov_Scam pointed out in a previous thread on this topic, you really do not want to encourage people to be very loose with their standards when it comes to applying violence to another person. It certainly can be difficult to summon lots of sympathy for the average person making a disturbance on the train, but that's missing the point. The kind of person who will aggressively (aggressively as the opposite of "conservatively" here, not in the sense of being the aggressor necessarily) use deadly physical force will likely not limit themselves to people that you personally find distasteful. Offend them on the road by cutting them off? They might take it on themselves to play cop and run you off the road. Take part in a protest they disagree with? Maybe they'll start a fight. Get into an argument at a bar? They might leave to retrieve a weapon, or wait for you outside.
To be clear, I'm not accusing Penny of being this type of person. I have no basis on which to make that particular determination. He might have just made an error in judgement (or he could even have acted in the right--I think this is unlikely, given the witness statements I've read, which don't seem to actually include any actions that Neely took that would constitute a serious threat to human life, but they could be incomplete or wrong). But the use of violence by civilians against other civilians has to be based on high and objective standards, rather than how we feel about the people involved.
I’m totally with you most of the way, but I think you’d want to make sure that the person is legally able to defend themselves while it’s still actually possible to do so successfully. If I have to wait for the burglar in my house to hold a gun to my head before I’m legally allowed to do anything to defend myself, in essence, I don’t have any right to defend myself, because I can only do so once it’s really too late. And I think this would lead to people simply ignoring the laws as they exist. If I’m going to jail unless I let the guy put a gun to my temple, there’s no benefit to restraint. If I shoot him in my driveway or once he comes in or when he starts to threaten me, I still go to jail. So why not go for broke here? Why not waste them in the driveway? With a reasonable self defense law, there’s a reason to not be hasty because while being hasty will probably send you to jail, there’s a point before he pulls the gun where I’m allowed to defend myself without the state’s goons coming after me.
I agree; I linked a video in another comment which goes into detail on the conditions that permit deadly force in self-defense. It includes, among other examples, a description of how drawing a gun, aiming, and firing can take substantially more time than charging at someone with a knife, even from a distance where the casual observer would look and say "that seems safe." My main point is that these standards have to depend on what the person involved actually did and could do in the moment, and that those actions have to reach an objective standard of threat. They cannot be based on someone's personal distaste, or on guesswork, or on the behavior of other people who might be similar, or on an immediate emotional reaction that is not grounded in reality.
The level of threat they have to reach is sometimes called "objective", but it's more of a "common knowledge" thing than an "objective fact" thing. The test is whether a reasonable person in that situation would believe unlawful physical force (or deadly physical force) was being used or was imminently going to be used. This absolutely allows for guesswork, consideration of the behavior for other people who might be similar, and even immediate emotional reactions provided a "reasonable person" would have similar ones.
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Was Neely choked to death? I was watching Tim Pool and he remarked that Neely was alive and unconscious when police arrived. I wonder if that was him talking out of his ass, then I looked it up more. From Time
I looked and I looked and I looked, and I found no account arguing this fact. Penny did not choke Neely to death. Penny choked Neely unconscious, and he then later died.
I mean, if the media keeps framing what happened in a deceitful way, and people never learn how menacing and threatening Neely was, literally threatening and in saying he will kill someone, than yeah sure. But this is an artifact of a lying media for most NPCs who have a received opinion on this topic. I doubt many people's priors are that someone can literally threaten to kill you, give every indication that they intend to kill you, and you must wait to be dead before you are allowed to do anything about it.
...
This seems a bit like saying that someone wasn't stabbed to death, just stabbed until they collapsed from blood loss, after which they later died. Yeah, if you choke someone unconscious and they proceed to never wake up, they were choked to death. I don't give a shit about Neely, I'm on the side that assumes Penny was a good Samaritan that had no intention of doing any harm beyond restraining the violent lunatic that was threatening people, but I also don't really see what I'm getting from the distinction above.
I'm not that knowledgeable about physiology, but what would cause someone to die after being choked?
Dying after being stabbed is obviously blood loss, dying while being choked is bloodflow restriction/breath loss, but I can't see what would cause death after the choking stops.
If you are choked, you will stop breathing, and if you stop breathing for a duration, you will suffer brain damage. If your breathing does not restart, you die. It may have been that after the choke ended, Neely was too brain damaged to be resuscitated, which makes sense since most accounts indicate he was choked for a pretty long period of time (10 mins, definitely enough to kill someone).
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Drugs in the system. Having a weak heart that gives out from the struggle. Either because of a defect, or some sort of systemic damage. Both, as habitual drug abuse often damages the heart.
Reading about the scant number of MMA fatalities actually revealed a lot of those fatalities were people with a undiagnosed heart condition who died in their first or second match.
Also brain bleeds, and organ failure brought on by dehydration.
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Unlike stabbing, choking is a continuous action. If you choke someone out, the expectation is that they will start to recover once they're released. "Choking someone to death" is generally expected to mean holding the choke until they're dead.
So if Penny choked Neely out, but released him before he died, that makes the excessive force and negligence claims much weaker. It certainly sinks any accusations of intent.
If he had punched him out, then he hit his head on the ground when falling and died, "beat him to death" could be said to be technically true, but wouldn't exactly give an audience an accurate picture of what happened.
Strangling is continuous, choking isn't (from a wrestling perspective).
A choke has a defined end; which is a tap, unconsciousness, or death. A choke leads to unconsciousness somewhere between 5 and 15 seconds (shit is faster than you think; once it is locked in.) and brain damage/ death in 1 - 5 mins. Assuming that this was a shitty armature choke as from a guy that had a couple months of light combatives once; it is still pretty murder-y.
Any choke that is held for more than 10 minutes is as excessive as shooting a dude 7 times that reloading and giving him another 7.
Given that he surrendered himself and doesn't seem to have intended to kill the dude, manslaughter seems about right.
No, a choke ends when it's released, which can be at any time. What happens afterwards isn't part of the choke.
That clearly didn't happen here though. Neely was fighting back for much longer.
Holding a choke for 10 minutes isn't excessive if the target is still fighting back at 9:50, just like shooting someone 14 times isn't excessive if the first 13 miss.
No, I mean that a choke physiologically CANNOT last longer than about 5-15 seconds. If you have a choke on someone and they are still struggling after that long, it is either autonomic flailing and their brain is about to die or you are actually strangling them.
Basically, there are two levels here. One is there is no safe way to squeeze someone's throat; which is fine. It's not supposed to be safe, it's supposed to be effective.
Two is if you squeeze someone's throat for more than the x amount of time (which is quite short actually), it is +/- equivalent to shooting them in the chest or stabbing them.
This is actually why I think that if anyone puts their hands on you in the street you are fully justified in killing them instantly: the human animal can live through ridiculous punishment then die because throat squeeze ouch.
All this is going waaaaaaaaaaaaay off track from what I started reeeeeing about though; that being that manslaughter charges are appropriate for someone that does something that commonly results in death without premediating or intending to kill the other dude.
"Choke" has been used, by me and the people I responded to, to mean "the act of choking someone". You can, physiologically, very easily hold a choke on someone who is already dead.
If your point is the distinction between choking and strangling, that's just a terminology nitpick.
I'm pretty sure you actually got it mixed up. Wikipedia:
"A chokehold [or] choke […] is a general term for a grappling hold that critically reduces or prevents either air (choking) or blood (strangling) from passing through the neck of an opponent."
But there isn't an "x amount of time". Even when properly applied, you yourself give ranges of time, but when not (as clearly the case with Penny and Neely) it can take much longer. And you typically have the warning of unconciousness before lasting damage. The proper thing to do is to release the choke on that, not after a countdown regardless of whether he's weakly twitching or trying to gouge your eyes out.
The "something that commonly results in death" is "keep holding the choke after unconciousness". You don't expect choking someone just until they stop resisting to result in death, regardless of how long it took.
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Neely clearly was NOT unconscious within 5 to 15 seconds, so all the rest of your reasoning does not follow.
'cause he was getting strangled, which is impossible to do safely. Even a short strangulation routinely fucks your neck up such that you die without medical care.
So, either he was choking him in such a way he would certainly die, or he was strangling the dude (which is also bad, and also ends in death if you hold it for 10+ mins.)
If you're using "strangle" to refer to cutting off air rather than blood, then yes, it is likely that is what was happening. And no, he probably didn't hold it for 10+ minutes; it's not that long between the stations in question.
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agree. I am not sure this distinction matters . Neely would otherwise be alive if not for the altercation. Maybe Penny's team can argue that the force was not excessive, because Neely died later.
This is a terrible take, that wipes away intent, reasonable expectations of the outcome of the altercation, and is just pure dystopian strict liability. It erases all differences between tazing someone, shooting someone, pepper spraying someone, holding someone, or even just yelling at someone with a frail heart. Did you take any sort of action in the direction of someone who died? Not sure the distinction about what you did really matters.
No. The eggshell skull rule is for civil law. In criminal law, if they punch you not intending to kill you, but do kill you, that's likely voluntary manslaughter, or what New York calls First Degree Manslaughter. It might not even be a crime at all, if the punch would not have been expected to cause serious physical injury.
Even in civil law, the eggshell skull rule is also only supposed to apply to damages; if there is no negligence there is no responsibility and thus no damages regardless of the plaintiff's skull state. In practice courts will draw the inference that there was negligence from the amount of damage caused (ignoring the plaintiff's hidden frailty), then apply the eggshell skull rule to award full damages, but that's because the courts are utterly broken.
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Well, largely that people get choked out, live on TV, all the damned time, and after consulting this list, none have ever died of it. So I would consider it categorically different than knifing someone.
I actually think MMA has given people are a false impression of the safety of chokes and that's probably part of what results in situations like Neely or Eric Gardner. Yes, people can be blood-choked and then quickly released without suffering long-term consequences. This is much safer if both participants are on the same page about the stopping point, are highly practiced and technically versed in the practice, are following a ruleset that mitigates lethal risk, and have an official to mediate and end the match as soon as someone is no longer capable of defending themselves. In real life, trying to control a flailing crackhead doesn't include a guy that's going to inform you that the crackhead's continued movements are autonomic and you need to release him. You may or may not know what you're doing and wind up crushing a windpipe. The crackhead may die from a combination of the physical stress and the massive quantity of drugs they've taken. But if you've watched some UFC and rolled a couple times, you kind of get the impression that this is completely safe rather than just less-lethal than other reliable means of incapacitation.
Yeah, and/or a false impression of the franticness and stakes when grappling outside of controlled conditions like in the octagon or in the gym, especially with a wild hobo.
MMA fighters often make it look so calm when they're grappling, as both the choked and choker are trying to conserve as much energy as possible while looking for subtle repositionings or the next opportunity. The stakes are also relatively low; if you have your opponent in a choke-hold but fail to choke him out, maybe you can just choke or knock him out later, maybe it goes to a decision. Worse comes to worse he later makes you tap, or chokes or knocks you out, but it's just another day at the office.
In contrast grappling a wild hobo is much more frantic, like a desperate fight for a knife in the mud. "Crackhead strength" used to be a common phrase. The stakes are much higher if you release your opponent before you're absolutely sure he's out, as he could do anything ranging from biting to stabbing you, or both. While his opponent was not a hobo, and "just" a home invader likely high on drugs, UFC Light Heavyweight Anthony Smith described how terrifying and difficult it can be trying to fight a deranged opponent, even a much-smaller one (albeit with high school wrestling experience): "No normal human is able to fight like that," Smith said. "I'm by no means the baddest dude on the planet. But he's a regular Joe and I had a hard time dealing with him. And he took everything that I gave him—every punch, every knee, every elbow. He took every single one of them and kept fighting me."
I'd much rather get into a street grappling match with a professional or ex-pro MMA fighter than a hobo. While my chances of winning are much lower with a professional MMA fighter (obviously), the downside of losing to a hobo is that you have no idea what he might do to you given an advantageous position—whereas a lot of pro-MMA fighters are quite merciful in street fights (e.g., Matt Serra and Ryan Hall) and most importantly, likely smell better (for example, Luke Rockhold was literally the figurative face of Polo Blue). It would seriously suck, though, if one got into an altercation with someone who sits at the intersection between ex-pro MMA fighter and wild hobo, like Krazy Horse Bennett.
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Yep. A lot of guys are going to tap as soon as they realize that they're blacking out or can't offer any more meaningful resistance against their opponent. That eliminates a lot of the danger right there.
Mike Cernovich made a similar point. MMA fighters tap out , newbs flail around
I mean. I've only dabbled in martial arts as a teenager. I might've earned a stripe or two on my white belt; I'm no badass martial artist. I've been choked out a few times doing BJJ. I was 5'6" and 130, and most of the guys were bigger and stronger. But when you get choked out by someone who knows what they're doing, you black out and go limp. After that, the other guy lets you go.
This was a case of a wild dude against a guy who didn't really know what he was doing. Also, three guys is kind of too few to restrain a man like that without risking seriously injuring or killing the other guy...when I was on the psych ER we generally wanted the ratio to be more like six or eight to one.
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Well that's just on them and their poor life choices. But even given the rest, what is the better option? What possible better option was there, aside from let Neely act on his threat to kill someone? And if that is the only choice being offered, then yeah, I default to
So I guess congratulations on boxing me into your false dichotomy.
Dude, I'm the one that doesn't care what happens to the vagrant. I flatly do not care that he fucked around and found out. I don't think the guy that killed him did so intentionally. I wish more people would behave like the Marine in the story. The only thing I'm arguing with you is the chain of causality wherein I'm pretty sure Neely wouldn't be dead if he hadn't been choked.
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