NEW YORK CITY — Manhattan prosecutors again accused Daniel Penny of failing to recognize the “humanity” of Jordan Neely during their closing arguments Monday, weeks after being accused of unfairly hinting at racial undertones in a case that does not involve hate crime charges.
“He didn’t recognize that Jordan Neely was a person,” Manhattan prosecutor Dafna Yoran told the jury. “He saw him as a person that needed to be eliminated.”
She claimed that Penny “was so reckless with Neely’s life because he didn’t seem to recognize his humanity.” She replayed video of Penny’s police interrogation, where he referred to Neely as a “crackhead” and told detectives, “You know these guys, they’re pushing people in front of trains and stuff.”
“We’ve all spoken dismissively about people like Jordan Neely,” she said. “Maybe we, too, have lumped them all together like this, but the context is very telling here. When the defendant is talking like this about Mr. Neely, he knows he very likely had killed him. Can you imagine a reasonable person speaking like this about a human being that he or she had just killed?”