Will indictment make Daniel Penny our last Good Samaritan?

The death of Jordan Neely and subsequent indictment of Daniel Penny ignited yet another heated conversation in our country, about race. As the son of a civil rights leader and as a man who has experienced the ugliness of racism firsthand, throughout the course of my life, I am not unsympathetic to the important role these conversations play in shaping how we progress as a society.  

But in this instance, as is often the case, the centrality of race in the discussions of the issues resulting in Neely’s death, may be dramatically overstating its relevance in this instance and thereby forcing our focus away from serious and hard questions that we, as a society, should be confronting.  

Namely, we should be discussing what it means in today’s world, to be the "Good Samaritan" and what are the reasonable expectations we can have of someone who decides to help a stranger, especially at the risk of personal harm.  

JORDAN NEELY SUBWAY CHOKEHOLD CAPTURED ON MORE VIDEO THAN PREVIOUSLY KNOWN, PROSECUTORS REVEAL

Penny has been indicted by a Manhattan grand jury for voluntary manslaughter in causing the death of Neely by means of a preemptive chokehold, following irrational statements, made by Neely, that suggested he was ready to do harm on a crowded subway train.  

Penny’s response to Neely’s behavior causes us to question the role of the Good Samaritan in protecting our society, and at what cost? 

For his part, MSNBC host Rev. Al Sharpton has, as typical, already weighed in on the former question, stating that "a Good Samaritan helps those in trouble, they don't choke them out." This is a surprisingly simplified and reductive reading of one of Jesus Christ’s parabolic teachings from one holding himself as a reverend.  

Does Sharpton mean to assert that had the assailant robber of the famed parable had been in the midst of his assault when the Samaritan happened upon him, the correct course of action would have been to continue walking? 

In my own reading of this important scripture, I focus less on the manner of help offered and more on the larger point Jesus was making in this parable. In a time period that was much more focused on class and other rigid distinctions than is our own, the Samaritan set aside reputational, financial and even personal safety concerns in order to do what he could for a stranger who he was supposed to despise, simply because it was the right thing to do.   

I see no reason why this should not extend to acting in the face of violence and the threats of violence.   

To be sure, despite the very confident claims of pundits on all sides, we cannot now know definitively how things transpired on the train that day, absent video surveillance evidence and based solely on eyewitness testimony of on-lookers, which of course are of dubious reliability in these scenarios to begin with. And all carry with them their own set of deep-seated biases in loaded circumstances such as these.   

But at a minimum, if we look at this situation objectively and not through the lens of politically motivated rushes to judgment, we can start to see a different picture than the mainstream media’s persistent narrative.  

For example, much is made of Penny’s status as a Marine veteran, with the implication being that his training affords him some kind of supernatural knowledge of the duration to continue the hold he applied depending on the desired degree of incapacitation.  

This is a silly notion. For sure, in the Marine Corps, Penny would have learned some level of hand-to-hand combat. But he was not Bruce Lee nor a character in a Chuck Norris movie. This comic book conceptualization of Penny distracts from reality: in actuality, this is a guy on a train placed into an unexpected and dangerous situation.  

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Surely, he bears a responsibility (as we all do) to not act excessively or with malicious intent, but the expectations we as a society hold for individuals in this kind of situation need to be reasonable and realistic. Moreover, these expectations cannot be so stringent and unrealistic that they dissuade normal individuals from stepping up to serve one another in hard situations.  

There is a lot more than the intentions of Daniel Penny to consider in the death of Jordan Neely. It’s worth-nothing that by acting so aggressively and loudly in going after Penny, New York City District Attorney Alvin Bragg has managed to elude nearly all questions of what he is doing in the city to address crime and mental illness, seemingly abdicating these responsibilities and placing them squarely on Penny’s shoulders.   

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But the narrative that has been constructed here has graver implications of which we must be cognizant.   

As the oft-repeated saying goes, the only thing necessary for evil to triumph in the world is that good men do nothing. It is my fear that in the rush to answer every incident with a politically expedient narrative, we create a society wherein even a Good Samaritan is demonized, good men do nothing.  

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