President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance will make their way to Landover, Maryland, on Saturday to attend the Army-Navy football game and will be joined by Daniel Penny, the Marine veteran recently acquitted in the subway chokehold case in New York City.
Vance posted on X that he invited Penny, who was just acquitted in the death of Jordan Neely, to join him in Trump’s suite.
“Daniel’s a good guy, and New York’s mob district attorney tried to ruin his life for having a backbone,” Vance posted. “I’m grateful he accepted my invitation and hope he’s able to have fun and appreciate how much his fellow citizens admire his courage.”
In the wake of his acquittal, Vance posted that “justice was done in this case. It was a scandal Penny was ever prosecuted in the first place.”
Also, attending Saturday’s game will be Pete Hegseth, Trump’s pick for secretary of defense and a former Army National Guard officer, and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Navy veteran. Hegseth is expected to meet with Trump, sources familiar with the matter tell ABC News.
The case involving Penny garnered national attention putting a spotlight on race, mental illness, public safety and homelessness.
Penny, a 26-year-old Marine veteran, put Neely in a chokehold after Neely entered the subway car acting erratically, officials said. Neely died due to compression of the neck, according to medical examiner Cynthia Harris.
Neely, a former street performer who would impersonate Michael Jackson, had a history of homelessness and schizophrenia. In addition, the 30-year-old had been convicted of assaulting people at subway stations, according to police. But passengers on the train with him and Penny said he did not touch anyone but he had expressed a willingness to die or even kill.
In an interview with Fox Nation, Penny described himself as being in a “vulnerable” position.
“He was just threatening to kill people,” Penny told Jeanine Pirro about Neely. “He was threatening to go to jail forever, to go to jail for the rest of his life.”
Prior to finding Penny not guilty of criminally negligent homicide, the jury was deadlocked on a more serious charge of manslaughter. The manslaughter charged, which carried a maximum 15-year sentence, was dismissed. The jury then turned to a lesser charge of criminally negligent homicide, which has a maximum 4-year sentence.
Now that Penny has been acquitted, the attention has been turned to the civil case filed against him by Neely’s father, Andre Zachery.
Meanwhile, House Speaker Mike Johnson said he would also be attending the game with Trump-Vance along with members of Republican leadership to discuss “in-depth” the sequence of the 119th Congress’ legislative agenda ahead of the game.
