Joe Scarborough Blasts Far-Left For Allowing Rampant Homelessness In Response To Daniel Penny Acquittal

MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough ripped the far-left Tuesday for allowing a homelessness and mental health crisis to take root in America’s biggest cities in response to the acquittal of 26-year-old Daniel Penny.

A jury found the former U.S. marine not guilty of criminal negligent homicide over the death of Jordan Neely, a 30-year-old homeless man, in a Manhattan courtroom on Monday after five days of deliberation. Scarborough argued that “progressives” have allowed for these sorts of situations to occur by not handling the mental health crisis in the U.S. and by challenging laws attempting to clear out homeless camps in their communities.

“The mental health system in this country, is again, just grossly insufficient whether you’re talking about New York, whether you’re talking about Florida, whether you’re talking about California. You have people walking around the streets that have mental health issues and the fact that some progressives have said basically ‘well, let’s pass laws that allow homelessness.’ You look at San Francisco, you look at Los Angeles, as we’ve said all along … there’s nothing compassionate about that. There’s nothing progressive about that. Leaving people with mental health problems on the street, no. We need to spend more money as a society taking care of those who have mental health challenges and not just say ‘yeah, you can live on the streets.’ Bad things happen.”

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Witnesses said Neely approached passengers in a threatening manner on a New York City subway in May 2023 by “trying to attack everybody,” throwing his jacket on the ground and exclaiming that he did not care about going to jail. Neely’s erratic behavior prompted Penny to detain the homeless man in a chokehold for at least 15 minutes, where Neely wound up losing consciousness.