Merriam-Webster defines impunity as exemption or freedom from punishment, harm, or loss. With their acquittal of Daniel Penny on the charge of criminally-negligent homicide in his killing of Jordan Neely, impunity is what the jury granted him. Jordan Neely was lynched for having a mental health crisis while black, poor, and homeless. A jury of Daniel Penny’s peers showed him the mercy that he didn’t show Jordan Neely. It didn’t matter that that Penny’s Marine instructor testified that he executed the hold incorrectly. It didn’t matter that at least one passenger is on video warning Penny that his chokehold was going to kill Neely. It didn’t matter that Neely had no weapon and didn’t harm anyone on the train before Penny literally choked the life out of him. The video of Neely being asphyxiated is a modern-day lynching postcard now.
I’m old enough to remember watching video footage of Rodney King being beaten within an inch of his life on video. I remember watching broadcasts of the destruction that resulted from people enraged by the verdict (and some opportunists too). Fast-forward almost 30 years and one of Ahmaud Arbery’s lynchers leaked the video of his crime thinking it would help him. He and his co-conspirators will likely spend the rest of their natural lives in prison. Video of George Floyd’s excruciating death under the knee of Derek Chauvin will keep the man in prison for nearly 2 decades from now. But just 4 year later, a vigilante can strangle a man to death with impunity.
My cynical mind wonders how the jurors who acquitted Daniel Penny responded to the broad daylight murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Perhaps the response to his murder (which has included very dark jokes and applause on social media) and the response to Neely’s lynching are two sides of the same coin.
Either way, we are (and have been for far too long) a nation too comfortable with violence, too numb to the suffering of those who are most often its victims. This puts everyone in a marginalized community at greater risk—not just from police (who will operate with even greater impunity than they already had once the second Trump administration begins), but now apparently from white vigilantes also.