Daniel Penny’s Lawyers Will Ask to Throw Out Chokehold Charge in N.Y.C. Subway Death Case

Minutes after a subway rider named Daniel Penny choked Jordan Neely in a train car in May 2023, Mr. Penny stood inside the Broadway-Lafayette Street station in Manhattan telling officers, “I just put him out.”

Mr. Penny was recorded on body-worn camera explaining to officers that Mr. Neely, a homeless man, had entered an F train and thrown his possessions on the ground, and that he was “was very aggressive, going crazy.”

“He’s like: ‘I’m ready to go to prison for life. I’m ready to die, I’m ready to die,’” Mr. Penny told an officer, according to court filings from prosecutors. “And I was standing behind him. I think I might have just put him in a choke, put him down. We just went to the ground. He was trying to roll up. I had him pretty good. I was in the Marine Corps.”

Last year, Mr. Penny, who is from Long Island, was charged with second-degree manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide by the Manhattan district attorney’s office, and jury selection for his trial is scheduled to begin on Oct. 21. In a hearing on Thursday, lawyers for Mr. Penny asked a judge to suppress the comments he made to officers at the subway station and later at a precinct house, and to dismiss the indictment against him.

When the video of the encounter spread online last year, it reverberated through the nation. The chokehold was captured in a four-minute video that showed Mr. Penny with his arms around Mr. Neely’s neck and his legs wrapped around his body. Mr. Neely struggled against Mr. Penny’s restraint as two other men stepped in to hold him down.

Mr. Penny cooperated with officers who came to the scene and arrested him after Mr. Neely died, even going back to the Fifth Precinct to speak with them, his lawyers said in court filings. However, his statements followed what they argued was an illegal arrest.