Months later, I'm pissed that Neely's toxicology report isn't public. We know that he was a regular user of K2. It's not beyond imagination that fentanyl was a factor.
The prosecution claims that Penny kept Neely in a choke hold for six minutes. The witnesses seem to contradict this claim. I find it unrealistic that anybody could maintain that kind of consistent pressure for that long, even a marine. Still, if it can be proven beyond a reasonable doubt that Neely was blacked out, and Penny just kept choking him despite the threat being subdued, Penny should go to prison. Still, again, that has to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt, there's no video, and the witnesses all seem to be on Penny's side.
With what we know now, I think the fact that Penny was charged to begin with is illustrative of a leftist opposition to self-defense in general. They're holding people to the impossible standard of knowing the physical state of their attackers.
I'll get some flack for this; but, if I were on the Chauvin jury, I would have voted not guilty. That method of subduing a suspect has probably been used thousands of times, and the only two times that I can point to in which it resulted in death were George Floyd and Tony Timpa -- the officers faced no charges for Tony Timpa.
The logic behind charging Daniel Penny creates a dangerous precedent.
I carry a gun every time I go out. I also carry pepper spray. Pepper spray, just like choke holds, is non-lethal in the overwhelming majority of cases. But, what if I'm attacked by somebody with a respiratory or heart condition, I use my pepper spray, and he dies? By the logic of these DAs, I should be charged with manslaughter (at the very least), even though I used legally non-lethal force against an attacker. It only became lethal either because of medical state of the attacker, or the shit that the attacker decided to put into his body before the attack -- none of which I would have any way of knowing.
Namely, I could have engaged in be exact same actions, and the majority of the time I would have simply incapacitated the attacker, and I would face no charges. If I get unlucky, and get attacked by a dude who has a lethal amount of drugs in his system, and I do the exact same thing, and he dies, a DA like Alvin Bragg would have me facing life in prison.
It seems that the left not only expects people who defend themselves to be mind-readers, but also entirely clairvoyant.
Even then, a lot of these people seem to want to follow the Soviet model of self-defense -- that you need to let your attacker stab you before you stab him, or you generally need to let your attacker take the first shot.