Daniel Penny, the man who was found not guilty in the chokehold death of Jordan Neely, will be the personal guest of Vice President-elect JD Vance at the Army-Navy game on Saturday.
Vance and Penny will watch the game from Trump’s suite at the Washington Commanders Stadium in Landover, Maryland, at 3 p.m. ET.
“Daniel’s a good guy, and New York’s mob district attorney tried to ruin his life for having a backbone,” Vance wrote in a post on X.”I’m grateful he accepted my invitation and hope he’s able to have fun and appreciate how much his fellow citizens admire his courage.”
NOTUS, a publication of the Allbritton Journalism Institute, first reported Penny’s plan to attend the game.
Penny, a former Marine, was acquitted Monday in the New York chokehold case, with a jury finding him not guilty of criminally negligent homicide.
Prosecutors accused Penny, who was 24 years old at the time of the incident, of causing Neely’s death after putting the 30-year-old homeless man in a chokehold on a subway train in May 2023.
Neely, who had a history of mental illness, had been shouting and acting erratically when he boarded the subway. Juan Alberto Vazquez, who witnessed the altercation on the subway, told NBC’s New York station at the time that Neely was being aggressive.
“The man got on the subway car and began to say a somewhat aggressive speech, saying he was hungry, he was thirsty, that he didn’t care about anything, he didn’t care about going to jail, he didn’t care that he gets a big life sentence,” Vazquez told the station in Spanish. “That ‘it doesn’t even matter if I died.’”
Synthetic cannabinoids were determined to be in his system when he died.
During the trial, a medical examiner testified that Neely died from “compression of neck (chokehold).”
The jury in the case was deadlocked last week on the more serious charge of manslaughter, causing the judge to dismiss the charge, which carried a maximum sentence of up to four years.
The case divided many people along political and racial lines, as Penny is white and Neely was Black.
After Penny was acquitted earlier this week, Vance said in a post on X, “I have not said much about this case out of fear of (negatively) influencing the jury. But thank God justice was done in this case. It was a scandal Penny was ever prosecuted in the first place.”
Janelle Griffith contributed.
