Jordan Neely killing/Daniel Penny charges

After Neely was sworn in, Biben faced him.
Did he understand that he was pleading guilty to a class-D felony?
“Yes,” Neely said.
“Are you pleading guilty because you are, in fact, guilty?”
“Yes.”
Biben set forth the terms of the agreement, then asked Neely if he had left Rikers with his belongings. Neely said he didn’t have any. He was free to go. “You are going to be escorted” to the program, the judge told him. “But you actually have to go, physically and mentally, make it to the program, and commit to being in the program. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“Yes, I do,” Neely said.
“This is very important,” Biben said. “Because if you leave the program, if you are discharged from the program, if you are out of touch with us, we will not be able to help you, and I’ll have to issue a bench warrant for your arrest. Understood?”
“Yes,” Neely said.

 

I have no idea.

I just know it said he bolted in less than 2 weeks.

I'll go back to his rap sheet when he was younger and according to his friend at least, nobody would have thought he was severely mentally ill. ... turnstile jumping, littering, things like those over and over again.

Maybe he had a pattern from an early age of just doing what he wanted, when he wanted, with no regard for laws and rules.

If that was how he went through life -- and there is probably plenty of evidence of that -- it might just be that he knew how to play the game in the court room to avoid going to prison. But then when he got to the residential program, he decided he didn't like it and with no bars, he left. A conscious choice.

I don't know the circumstances around it. Without knowing, I just don't automatically default to every bad thing he ever did having been him being a helpless victim with no control over his own choices. If anything, he seemed to know exactly what he had to say and do to get the residential treatment program rather than a state prison.

 

Of course they are. I was looking at Twitter yesterday to see people's reactions to the profile.

85 percent: Heartbreaking! He was a sweet, gentle, unhoused victim who was just trying to moonwalk his way through all the systemic such and suches that were responsible for killing him.
The rest: He was an unhinged criminal maniac who rode the subway terrorizing innocent tax payers. He should have been in prison!

Miller didn't write it as cartoonishly as the first one of those, but it was certainly her bias. She put a lot of work into that profile. ... but extensively quoted only people who loved him and didn't have an unbiased view of him.

The profile did a very good job of documenting the tough life he had -- the facts. But in terms of questions about how he got to the day he died, people who have no clue if he was really a good guy or a bad guy or just how his own decisions played a role in how things evolved for him, are straining to frame him the way they want him to have been, not how he necessarily actually was.