With yesterday’s developments in the Daniel Penny trial, it is appropriate to ponder the various ethical issues involved.

Below I have reposted the 2023 essay titled “Ethics Quote Of The Month: Heather MacDonald.” Its main thrust was to highlight MacDonald’s excellent article about how his arrest and prosecution reflected another outbreak of the “Black Lives Matter” bias of presumed racism. Penny is white, the violent lunatic who was menacing NYC subway riders when Penny stepped in and, the prosecution claimed, murdered him in an act of vigilantism, was black. It is highly doubtful that any prosecution would have followed the incident if the races were reversed. For example, the colors were reversed in the Ashli Babbitt shooting by a Capitol cop on January 6, 2021, and the black officer was not only exonerated but given a promotion.

Yesterday, Judge Maxwell Wiley dismissed the second-degree manslaughter charge against ex-Marine Penny in the death of Jordan Neely at the request of prosecutors after jurors said they were deadlocked on the primary charge. He then told the jury to continue deliberating on  the lesser charge of whether Penny committed criminally negligent homicide when he put the black, disturbed, homeless man in a choke-hold resulting in his death. The dismissed second-degree manslaughter charge carried a maximum 15-year sentence; criminally negligent homicide carries a four-year maximum sentence. While this was happening, Rep. Eli Crane (R-Ariz.) told reporters that he was planning to introduce a resolution to award Daniel Penny the Congressional Gold Medal. “Daniel Penny’s actions exemplify what it means to stand against the grain to do right in a world that rewards moral cowardice,” said Crane, a retired Navy SEAL.  “Our system of ‘justice’ is fiercely corrupt, allowing degenerates to steamroll our laws and our sense of security, while punishing the righteous. Mr. Penny bravely stood in the gap to defy this corrupt system and protect his fellow Americans. I’m immensely proud to introduce this resolution to award him with the Congressional Gold Medal to recognize his heroism.”

You can hardly highlight an ethics conflict in brighter colors than that. Penny could be found guilty of a crime, and at the same time be officially recognized as a hero. An ethics conflict is when two equally valid ethical principles oppose each other and dictate a different result. That’s the situation here, and the answer to the starting point for ethical analysis, “What’s going on here?“

The racially biased motivation for charging Penny may be another example of authorities doing the right thing for the wrong reasons. If you listen to Fox News regarding the trial, you will hear laments that the prosecution sends the wrong message to Americans. One commentator cited the 60-year-old Kitty Genovese incident, which Ethics Alarms has frequently referenced. A woman was murdered as many residents of a nearby apartment complex heard her screams, but none of them called the police or sought to intervene. The prosecution of Penny validates their non-action, the commentator said. It encourages passive citizenship and rejects the duty to rescue.

No, that’s an analogy too far: the man threatening passengers on the subway was right in front of Penny; the people who ignored Genovese’s screams only had to pick up a phone. Nobody held them to blame for not running out to rescue the woman and fight off her attacker. They didn’t perform the minimum acts of good citizenship required in such a situation. Penny’s trial raises the legitimate question of when maximum intervention is justified, and what the consequences should be if something goes wrong.

Does society want to encourage and reward vigilantes? The “Death Wish” movies explored that issue, albeit at an infantile level. At very least, shouldn’t part of the message sent to citizens be that if you choose to intervene in a situation that would normally be handled by law enforcement, you had better be careful, prudent and effective or else you will be accountable for what goes wrong as a result of your initiative? After all, isn’t it certain that a police officer whose choke-hold killed Neely under the same circumstances would probably be tried, or at very least sued for damages (as Penny will be, if he is ultimately acquitted)? Indeed, based on the George Floyd fiasco, Neely’s death at the hands of an over-zealous cop might have sparked a new round of mostly peaceful protests and Neely’s elevation to martyr status.

As a society and one that encourages courage, compassion, and civic involvement, we should encourage citizens to intervene and “fix the problem” if they are in a position to do so and have the skills and judgment to do it effectively. Yet a society that encourages vigilantes is courting chaos and the collapse of the rule of law.  I absolutely regard Penny as a hero, but even heroes must be accountable for their actions. What is the most ethical message to send society about citizen rescuers?

I don’t think it is as easy a question as Penny’s supporters claim.

Now here’s the article from past year:

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“When government abdicates its responsibility to maintain public safety, a few citizens, for now at least, will step into the breach. Penny was one of them. He restrained Neely not out of racism or malice but to protect his fellow passengers. He was showing classically male virtues: chivalry, courage and initiative. Male heroism threatens the entitlement state by providing an example of self-reliance apart from the professional helper class. And for that reason, he must be taken down.”

—Heather Mac Donald, in her scorching essay, “Daniel Penny is a scapegoat for a failed system”

That paragraph continues,

A homicide charge is the most efficient way to discourage such initiative in the future. Stigma is another. The mainstream media has characterized the millions of dollars in donations that have poured into Daniel Penny’s legal defense fund as the mark of ignorant bigots who support militaristic white vigilantes.

There is no way law enforcement can or should avoid at least exploring a manslaughter charge when an unarmed citizen is killed after a good Samaritan intervenes in a situation that he or she sees as potentially dangerous. Nevertheless, what appears to be the planned vilification of ex-Marine Daniel Penny by Democrats and the news media to put desperately-needed wind back in the metaphorical sails of Black Lives Matter and to goose racial division as the 2024 elections approach graphically illustrates just how unethical and ruthless the 21st Century American Left has become. (I know, I know, we don’t need any more evidence…). Mac Donald’s essay is superb, as many of hers often are. Do read it all, and them make your Facebook friends’ heads explode by sharing it.

Here are some other juicy and spot-on excerpts:

“Neely has been turned into a symbol of a racist system of law enforcement and of civilian values that exaggerate the threat of mentally ill vagrants to keep minorities down. Three weeks after Neely’s death, on May 21, another homeless man in New York City slammed a woman’s head into a subway car, likely paralyzing her for life, if she even survives. Neely’s champions have been silent about this latest subway assault.”

I didn’t know about that attack, because apparently the mainstream media didn’t think it was important….or at least important enough to risk undercutting their allies’ narrative.

Jordan Neely was a standard product of New York’s homelessness empire. A thirty-year-old schizophrenic drug addict, Neely…[d]espite his predilection for assaulting the elderly, he had been repeatedly allowed to skip out of treatment and jail. In 2019, Neely punched Filemon Castillo Baltazar in the head as the sixty-five-year-old waited for a subway in Greenwich Village. In June 2021, he walloped Anne Mitcheltree in the head inside a deli in the East Village; she was in her late sixties. In November 2021, Neely broke the nose and fractured the eye socket of a sixty-seven-year-old woman as she exited a subway  on the Lower East Side….

None of these attacks landed Neely in long-term mental health confinement…

Again, the scourge of Democrat-run cities deliberately allowing criminals and threats to law-abiding citizens escape consequences of their actions…

…while vagrants have a right to shelter, they have no obligation to use it. They are free to continue colonizing public and private spaces if they prefer. Taxpayers, meanwhile, have no choice in whether they pay for the scorned shelter; it must always be available to the finicky homeless, whether it is accepted or not. Conferring such choice on street colonizers guarantees that the street population will remain “unhoused,” since the vast majority of that population prefers the street lifestyle of uninhibited drug use and bounteous handouts to even the most nonjudgmental, anything-goes shelter. And, most critically, that unhoused population provides lifetime employment for government bureaucrats and private social service providers.

So add the city to Neely’s family and warped woke priorities as responsible parties for his death.

New York’s medical examiner ruled that Neely died from compression of the neck. But because Neely’s autopsy report has not been released, it is impossible to know whether drug intoxication, exacerbating stress on the heart, or other complicating factors may have contributed to Neely’s death. 

Déjà vu, anybody?

[A]s soon as the video became public, a glad cry must have gone out at the headquarters of Race-Baiting, Inc.: Penny was white, and Neely was black! Therefore, white supremacy killed Neely, just as it has allegedly killed so many other black homicide victims….A New York state senator called Neely’s death a “lynching.” Yusef Salaam, a New York City Council candidate, announced at Neely’s funeral that the public had “witnessed the lynching, a lynching, a lynching in the public square, a lynching of a Black man who was never given a chance by the system that was designed to keep him oppressed.” … The fact that Penny was not immediately arrested and indicted showed the “systemic racism that robs us of our basic humanity in life and death,” according to the speaker of the New York City Council. New York Mayor Eric Adams echoed Barack Obama’s statement that if Obama had had a son, that son would have looked like Trayvon Martin (the Florida teenager fatally shot by George Zimmerman in 2012). Adams noted that his son was also named Jordan and that Neely was “black like me,” facts of dubious relevance to the case. “No family should have to suffer a loss like this,” Adams added. “And too many black and brown families bear the brunt of a system long overdue for reform.

…because Barack Obama unforgivable linking of Trayvon Martin to his own family has worked out so well for American race relations…

Penny’s critics were certain that Neely posed no threat. “It became very clear that he was not going to cause harm to these other people,” New York Governor Kathy Hochul said. How Hochul had gained such psychological expertise from the safety of her chauffeured SUV was unclear. Neely was just another subway “passenger.” “Passengers are not supposed to die on the floor of our subways,” Neely’s family said, speaking through their lawyers. …Saying that subway passengers are not supposed to die is like saying that pedestrians are not supposed to die crossing the street, after one of them has run into oncoming traffic in the dark. Context is all.”

The NYC mayor, the state’s governor…Ethics Alarms hereby issues a travel advisory for sane and ethical people considering travel to New York…

“The most astonishing aspect of the left’s narrative is not the tired racism conceit. The most astonishing claim is that it was Penny who lacked compassion and not the engineers of a status quo that left Neely free to decompose on the streets. We are supposed to believe that a system that has hundreds of contacts with a mentally ill vagrant and that allows him to continue his destructive lifestyle is caring.”

There is a lot more: it is an important and a brilliantly argued piece. Whoever runs as a Republican in 2024 should practice explaining Mac Donald’s points on the campaign trail. My favorite passage, I think:

Contrary to the anti-white narrative, white on black homicides are almost nonexistent. Blacks commit 87 percent of all non-lethal interracial violence between blacks and whites and whites and blacks; blacks are roughly thirty-five times more likely to commit violent offenses against whites than whites are to commit violent offenses against blacks.

Existing while black is more dangerous than existing while white, but not because of white supremacy. In the first eighteen months of the pandemic, black juveniles were shot at 100 times the rate of white juveniles. (That shooting spike began only after the George Floyd race riots.) Had any of those black juvenile gun victims been shot or killed by whites, we would have heard about it. Instead, the rule for deciphering crime reporting is as follows: if the race of a crime suspect is not provided, the suspect is black. That rule applies when the victim is black and even more so when the victim is white. 

If a crime suspect is white, however, that fact will usually be reported and it will always be the lead in any story in the rare instance when the victim is black. 

Obviously, the author is a racist, and so am I, for praising and circulating her work.

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Pointer: Other Bill