Daniel Penny’s self-defense case presents a dilemma for him and NYC in the future
Here’s the thing about self-defense in the big city: You can be damned if you do, but maybe dead if you don’t — and you can never know which in advance.
Do you risk it?
Think of this as Daniel Penny’s dilemma — and New York City’s into the foreseeable future.
Penny chose to defend himself and other F-train passengers in lower Manhattan May 1. When it was over, a career criminal with a long history of violent behavior was dead — and the former Marine Corps sergeant was under arrest.
On Wednesday, Penny was formally indicted on a charge of manslaughter in the second degree; he’s looking at 15 years in prison.
Any determined DA, as a former chief judge of New York’s top court once wryly noted, can indict a ham sandwich — and Manhattan’s Alvin Bragg has done just that.
Not that Penny is a ham sandwich, of course. Far from it.
But Bragg is a determined DA — determined, that is, to impose a quite peculiar view of crime and punishment on the borough, never mind the consequences.
He’s not solely responsible for the crime spikes that have beset the city since 2019. Circumstances, the pandemic and race-obsessed lawmakers in Albany and on the City Council have all done their bit.
Still, when Bragg early on announced that he wasn’t interested in vigorous prosecution of anything short of bloody murder, New York noticed.
The result hasn’t been a crime wave of the pre-Giuliani era sort. That reflected the arrival of a novel new drug — crack — and its impact was felt everywhere and all the time.
Today the threat is episodic and largely confined to public spaces — the subways in particular — and it is driven by a refusal to enforce even minimal behavior standards.
Encounters with the aggressively mentally ill and threatening, drug-addicted panhandlers happen everyday; they are terrifying precisely because they are random, potentially lethal —and, of course, because when they happen there is almost never a cop in sight.
Picture the F train at Broadway-Lafayette on May Day, when the late Jordan Neely was threatening the lives of subway passengers and Daniel Penny put an end to it.
Impermissible vigilantism? Or legitimate self-defense?
Well, Alvin Bragg’s grand jury has decided to have a Manhattan petit jury sort all that out.
But if Mr. District Attorney — and, indeed, New York’s crew of progressive co-conspirators — set out to write a recipe for vigilante violence, they couldn’t do better than what they’ve already done.
When a city’s public spaces are ceded to the addled and addicted, what happens next — unpredictable violence — is inevitable.
So now Daniel Penny is in the dock. But he’s not the only one who belongs there — if, indeed, he even does.
Alvin Bragg needs to look in the mirror.
