MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough ripped the far-left Tuesday for allowing a homelessness and mental health crisis to take root in America’s biggest cities in response to the acquittal of 26-year-old Daniel Penny.
A jury found the former U.S. marine not guilty of criminal negligent homicide over the death of Jordan Neely, a 30-year-old homeless man, in a Manhattan courtroom on Monday after five days of deliberation. Scarborough argued that “progressives” have allowed for these sorts of situations to occur by not handling the mental health crisis in the U.S. and by challenging laws attempting to clear out homeless camps in their communities.
“The mental health system in this country, is again, just grossly insufficient whether you’re talking about New York, whether you’re talking about Florida, whether you’re talking about California. You have people walking around the streets that have mental health issues and the fact that some progressives have said basically ‘well, let’s pass laws that allow homelessness.’ You look at San Francisco, you look at Los Angeles, as we’ve said all along … there’s nothing compassionate about that. There’s nothing progressive about that. Leaving people with mental health problems on the street, no. We need to spend more money as a society taking care of those who have mental health challenges and not just say ‘yeah, you can live on the streets.’ Bad things happen.”
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Witnesses said Neely approached passengers in a threatening manner on a New York City subway in May 2023 by “trying to attack everybody,” throwing his jacket on the ground and exclaiming that he did not care about going to jail. Neely’s erratic behavior prompted Penny to detain the homeless man in a chokehold for at least 15 minutes, where Neely wound up losing consciousness.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg charged Penny with second-degree manslaughter and criminal negligent homicide in May 2023 after a medical examiner deemed Neely’s death a homicide. However, a forensic pathologist later hired by Penny’s attorneys said during the trial that Neely died from the “combined effects of sickle cell crisis, the schizophrenia, the struggle and restraint and the synthetic marijuana” in his system, according to NBC News.
Judge Maxwell Wiley dropped the manslaughter charge on Friday after the jury reached a “deadlock.”
Left-wing groups have legally challenged local and state laws outlawing homeless campsites on public property in an attempt to clear up areas taken over by local homeless populations. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sued a city ordinance passed in Spokane, Washington, in August that deemed it a misdemeanor to camp on public property, while a judge issued an injunction in September 2023 that prevented officials in San Francisco, California, from clearing out tent encampments in the city.
Homelessness has continued to significantly surge in California despite Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom dedicating more than $30 billion to address the crisis since 2019. Los Angeles spent more than $1 billion annually to address the homeless crisis, yet homelessness rose by 10% in 2023.
The Supreme Court ruled in the landmark case Grants Pass v. Johnson that banning encampments on public property did not violate the U.S. Constitution in a 6-3 decision in June. The case responded to the Ninth Circuit’s previous ruling that a ban on encampments in Grant Pass, Oregon, violated the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of “cruel and unusual punishment.”
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