"The View" co-hosts Whoopi Goldberg and Sunny Hostin expressed frustration over the acquittal of Daniel Penny, the former U.S. Marine who was found not guilty on Monday for the negligent homicide of homeless man Jordan Neely on Monday.
During the Tuesday episode of the ABC daytime talk show, Goldberg criticized Penny and his legal defense team for celebrating the defendant’s not guilty verdict at a bar, while Hostin suggested that the verdict was wrong, because Neely wasn’t seriously threatening anybody on the subway before Penny administered a chokehold on him.
"And so, when you look at that and you look at the result of what happened, my question is, where is our compassion as a society?" Hostin asked, implying justice was not served.
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Penny, a 26-year-old Marine veteran and architecture student, was charged last year with manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide for the subway chokehold death of Neely, a 30-year-old homeless man with schizophrenia who barged onto the train shouting death threats while high on a type of synthetic marijuana known as K2.
The first charge against Penny was dismissed last week, while he was pronounced not guilty on the second. Whoopi voiced her frustration after seeing Penny out at a bar celebrating the verdict with his legal team.
"I don’t know that seeing them celebrating in a bar made me comfortable, you know," she began, adding, "I mean, you killed a guy. The man is dead and maybe just – you take the celebration home, you don’t do it outside. But that’s just me."
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She then sympathized with Neely, stating, "And people are conflicted because he was an ill man and the more information we’re learning about him now – turns out his mom had been murdered and that may have been what set him off on his mental path."
"There’s failure all over here," Goldberg added. "There’s failure of the system… failure on the part of the courts, failure on the part of the hospitals, and failure on our part and how we deal with this."
Later in the discussion, Hostin disputed that Neely was as much of a threat to metro passengers as reports say he was before Penny put him in a chokehold.
"That’s the thing: how do we describe and subscribe danger and who is dangerous, right?" she began. "Neely, a former Michael Jackson impersonator – he talked about being hungry and thirsty, and he said he didn’t care if he lived or died. There is no evidence that he attacked anyone. There’s no evidence that he put his hands on anyone –"
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"On this occasion," co-host Alyssa Farah Griffin chimed in. Earlier in the segment, she expressed her opinion that Penny was not the "villain" in this account.
"On this occasion," Hostin repeated, acknowledging Griffin’s point. She continued, "No one on the train would’ve known that he touched someone before. Multiple people testified that he didn’t approach anyone in a threatening manner."
The co-host then cited Whoopi’s point that Neely’s mother being murdered destroyed his mental health.
"And his family says that is when his mental health started to decline," Hostin said. "Where is our compassion as a society?"
