In his testimony on Thursday, a forensic pathologist employed by Daniel Penny’s lawyers stated that Jordan Neely’s death was caused by a combination of several causes rather than a chokehold.
In connection with Neely’s chokehold murder on a New York City subway train in May 2023, Penny faces charges of manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide.
The defense is attempting to disprove testimony from a New York City medical examiner who determined that Neely died from compression to his neck as a consequence of a chokehold, and Dr. Satish Chundru was the second expert witness to testify.
Chundru, a consultant and forensic pathologist, claimed to have performed over 9,000 autopsies while serving as a medical examiner for Texas and Florida counties. He said that just over two weeks after Neely’s murder, the defense kept him on board.
On May 1, 2023, Neely, 30, who had a history of mental illness, boarded an uptown F train, yelled, flung his jacket to the ground, and made upsetting remarks about wanting to go back to jail and being hungry and thirsty. Neely was choked and brought to the ground by Penny, a 26-year-old train passenger. According to his lawyers, he acted to defend those around him and had no intention of killing Neely.
According to the prosecution, Penny choked Neely for six minutes before releasing him only after he had lost consciousness and gone limp. For some of that period, he had assistance from two other persons in keeping Neely under control. People in New York and abroad were split by a witness video that went viral online showing Penny choking Neely on the train vehicle floor. While some criticized his acts and called him a vigilante, others saw them as admirable.
Chundru’s evidence ran counter to that of Dr. Cynthia Harris, the medical examiner who conducted Neely’s autopsy and determined that the chokehold was the cause of his death. Chundru stated that he didn’t think Penny had put Neely in a chokehold or that she had exerted enough pressure on him repeatedly to knock him out.
According to Chundru, he thinks that Neely’s death was caused by a confluence of his sickle cell crises, schizophrenia, struggle and restraint, and the synthetic marijuana he was taking. Among other things, he claimed to have examined Neely’s autopsy report, two toxicology tests, genetic studies, autopsy photos, a few films of the incident, psychiatric records, witness accounts, and police body camera video transcripts.
Andre Zachary, Neely’s father, left the courtroom several times throughout Chundru’s evidence, including when he stated that Neely had not died from a chokehold. Zachary also hung his head while portions of the bystander footage were presented on Thursday.
Harris informed jurors that Neely died by asphyxia, but Chundru chastised him for making that decision before toxicology and other testing were finished.
In her three-day testimony, Harris, a prosecution witness, stated that she made her choice after considering the autopsy results, the video and the investigative material around it, as well as her awareness of Neely’s use of synthetic cannabinoids. She was there in the courtroom when Chundru testified on Thursday.
Steven Raiser, one of Penny’s lawyers, devoted hours to pointing out flaws in her conclusions and evidence. He asked how she arrived at her conclusion in the absence of complete toxicological data.
She stated that no toxicological outcome could alter her opinion.
Harris described Penny’s dying minutes to the jurors, including the precise moment he made his last deliberate movement. She also stated in her testimony that there was unanimous agreement in the medical examiner’s office on Neely’s cause of death.
Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Dafna Yoran, who was cross-examining Chundru, seemed to cast doubt on the caliber of his work by implying in a series of questions that he conducted more autopsies annually than the National Association of Medical Examiners, of which he is a member, advises. On Friday, Yoran will resume her cross-examination.
This week, the defense invited six witnesses, including Penny’s mother and sister, to testify as character witnesses. In her testimony, his sister, 27-year-old accountant Jacqueline Penny, talked about their suburban childhood in West Islip, Long Island, a little community she characterized as beachy and friendly.
She claimed that because Penny had always been patriotic and other males in their family had served in the military, she was not overly shocked when he joined the Marines after graduating from high school.
Gina Flaim-Penny, their mother and a Queens-based teacher’s aide, said that she raised Penny to treat others the way she wanted to be treated and that she thought he did. She claimed that although it was tough for all four of her children when she and Penny’s father separated, they remained close and supported one another. According to her, they attended family counseling, and her kids also saw a counselor. She stated in her testimony that she was aware of her son’s empathy, compassion, and calm nature.
The defense brought four additional character witnesses, in addition to Penny’s mother and sister, to attest to Penny’s honesty, integrity, and empathy. Their testimony came after prosecutors presented evidence that Penny had lied to police during an interview.
In an interview at a precinct, Penny told two detectives that he did not apply pressure to Neely’s neck and that he had released his chokehold as soon as he got confirmation from the two men who assisted him in holding Neely that they were doing so. This was hours after Neely was killed, according to a video that jurors watched. However, Eric Gonzalez, one of those guys, said last week that Penny kept his chokehold on him after he told him, “I’ll grab his hands so you can let go.”
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