George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley said Monday that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg was “the most surprised person” in a Manhattan courtroom after the acquittal of Daniel Penny, saying Bragg banked on jurors compromising on a lesser charge.
A Manhattan jury found Penny not guilty Monday on charges of criminally negligent homicide in the death of Jordan Neely after a judge dismissed a manslaughter charge against the Marine veteran. Turley said that Bragg had been banking on the jury convicting Penny on the lesser charge.
“This is not, obviously, how district attorney Bragg had planned this,” Turley told Fox News host Harris Faulkner. “The way the case was going, was along the sort of design that Bragg had to force a compromise verdict. When the jury deadlocked over the more serious crime, the judge went ahead and allowed them to consider this lesser offense. That is basically what Bragg had hoped, that if he could not get a conviction on the more serious crime, which was unlikely, that they would compromise and convict him on the lesser offense which, by the way, still came with a potential penalty of four years.”
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“So, I think the most surprised person in that room may be Alvin Bragg,” Turley continued. “Because you have a jury that apparently couldn’t agree on the more serious offense, but then they came back and they said, ‘but we do agree he is not guilty of the lesser offense.’ So it is not exactly how this was supposed to play out in his view.”
Neely, 30, died after being restrained by Penny, a Marine Corps veteran riding the New York City subway on May 1, 2023. The ex-Marine surrendered to face charges of second-degree manslaughter on May 12, 2023.
Turley expressed that Bragg wouldn’t seek to subject Penny to a new trial on the manslaughter charge.
“I think that would be very difficult now,” Turley told Faulkner. “You have a jury that just said, we don’t think he is guilty of the lesser offense, and the standard for criminal negligence is vanishingly light in the view of many criminal defense attorneys, it doesn’t take a whole lot. So, if he couldn’t convict on that, it would be particularly outrageous for him to try any further prosecution.”
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