Noted attorney Alan Dershowitz said Wednesday that Marine veteran Daniel Penny will likely prevail in the civil lawsuit filed against him in connection with the death of homeless man Jordan Neely.
Although a jury acquitted Penny on Monday of criminally negligent homicide, he now faces a civil lawsuit from Neely’s father, Andre Zachery, seeking damages. Dershowitz, on “The Glenn Beck Program,” argued that the lawsuit is unlikely to succeed due to Zachery’s lack of a relationship with his son, and the jury’s findings in the criminal trial.
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“There’s a civil lawsuit against him, but he’ll win that civil lawsuit. It’ll probably never get past the motion to dismiss because the person bringing it was a father who had nothing to do with the son,” Dershowitz said. “He had had no relationship with the son; he became the father only after the killing in order to gain publicity from it.”
Host Glenn Beck asked if Dershowitz was saying that Zachery has “no standing” to sue Penny civilly, with the attorney confirming that he was. Zachery was mostly absent during Neely’s childhood, according to a 2023 profile of Neely published by New York Magazine.
“And what’s his damages? It’s very hard to figure out what they are. And moreover, a jury found that there was no causation in death, there was justification. So I don’t think that lawyers interested in the money … even the publicity at this point, are going to want to bring that case forward,” Dershowitz added. “I think it’ll be dropped. It’s not like the O.J. [Simpson] case, where clearly there was a strong civil case after he was acquitted, and they won the civil case, although they never collected any money.”
A criminal jury acquitted the now-deceased former football star Simpson in October 1995 on charges of murdering his ex-wife Nicole Brown and her friend Ronald Goldman after their deaths in June 1994, according to The New York Times. Subsequently, a jury found Simpson liable for the deaths of Brown and Goldman in 1997, ordering him to pay the Goldman family $8.5 million in compensatory damages as well as pay $25 million in punitive damages, according to CNBC.
Penny in 2023 placed Neely in a chokehold for several minutes after he was yelling and acting erratically on a New York City subway. Witnesses said they felt threatened by the homeless man’s conduct.
CNN legal analyst Joey Jackson asserted Monday that the Manhattan jury was justified in acquitting Penny. He suggested jurors may have believed the incident was an act of self-defense or that the Marine veteran wasn’t responsible for Neely’s death due to the influence of schizophrenia and drugs in the homeless man’s system.
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