Daniel Penny's defense attorneys spoke out for the first time since their client was found not guilty of criminally negligent homicide in the 2023 subway chokehold death of Jordan Neely, expressing their shock at how the final days of the trial played out.
Steven Raiser and Thomas Kenniff told Fox News anchor Martha MacCallum on "The Story" Tuesday that they had concerns about the trajectory of the trial when Judge Maxwell Wiley dismissed the second-degree manslaughter charge against Penny after the jury said they couldn’t come to a unanimous decision about the top charge.
The judge then instructed the jury to consider the second charge of criminally negligent homicide, a move Raiser said was "unprecedented" because it potentially encourages a "compromise verdict."
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"If you have a deadlocked jury, you don't want to tell them, well, you know, just, why don't you guys just agree that you can go with the lesser count, right? And the law is actually set up that way so that doesn't happen," he told MacCallum.
Once the manslaughter charge was removed and the jury could focus on the second charge, Raiser said they were concerned that somebody who's considering a guilty verdict on the top count might be considering a guilty verdict on the second one, too.
"At that point, we thought the best we could really hope for was a hung jury, but we didn't know. And we also did feel that there was some interplay here as far as understanding the lengths at which this district attorney's office would go in order to secure a conviction, which was quite off-putting for the defense team," he added. "We've never seen anything quite like it."
Penny, 26, and his legal team celebrated the jury’s not-guilty verdict at a bar in Lower Manhattan.
Kenniff said he hopes his client takes a nice long vacation in the aftermath of the case, although Penny still faces a civil lawsuit from Neely’s father, Andre Zachery.
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Zachery accuses Penny of causing his son’s death through "negligence, carelessness and recklessness" and seeks unspecified damages for assault and battery, according to a copy of the civil complaint.
"[If] somebody wants to try and profiteer ghoulishly off this tragedy, understand that we're going to push back at that with this -- with equal vigor," said Kenniff of Zachery’s suit against Penny.
Raiser added that Penny, a Marine veteran, will continue to pursue his architecture degree but will always have "scars" on his shoulders from the ordeal.
He denounced threatening behavior towards his client and threats from agitators upset with the outcome of the trial, saying Penny should walk the streets with his head held high because he was acquitted by a jury of his peers.
