Daniel Penny walked out of the courtroom in New York City free of all charges after the chokehold he used against Jordan Neely ended the life of the homeless man.

Neely had schizophrenia and was famous as a Michael Jackson impersonator. Using Google Images and typing in Jordan Neely it’s uncanny the resemblance in the photos.

The New York Post newspaper on the front page claimed Penny shouldn’t have been arrested to begin with. That the case shouldn’t have been sent to trial.

You kill someone you should be arrested and receive a trial by jury to determine whether you’re guilty or innocent. There’s no subjectively NOT arresting whoever you don’t want to arrest as you think it’s OK that they killed someone.

Conservative Christians and others contributed a million dollars to the ex-Marine’s legal fund. Penny was hailed as a Hero for intervening when Neely was psychotic and threatened riders on a NYC subway train a year ago.

It begs the question as to Fear: what people going about their ordinary lives every day should fear and what we should not fear.

The prosecuting attorney’s argument was weak if you ask me. After the verdict of innocent protests took over in the streets in New York City.

The fact is in light of a person like Neely with untreated mental illness acting out in public there’s guilt by association. You and I might not be violent. Yet once we tell another person we have a mental illness they’ll think we could “snap” at any minute in the future.

We who are recovered and doing well must advocate for individuals like Jordan Neely who fall through the cracks. Those cracks are as wide as the Grand Canyon and easy to fall into.

The Mad crowd are against using medication at any time. They think psychiatry is a pseudo-science. In this realm the anti-psychiatry folk have pulled sway in society.

The choice to take medication is the right of the individual. For those of us who’ve discontinued our medication and had a severe relapse I would say the only choice is to pop those pills again.

How would Open Dialogue or any other “hold their hand in a quiet room to cure them” philosophy help a person like Neely who was severely ill to begin with.

Right. Right.

I will always talk about how taking pills allowed me to recover. It’s not my place to tell others what they should do or not do. My story is out there in my first book Left of the Dial. Pretty convincing that narrative was on its own.

Jordan Neely didn’t deserve to die. We don’t need people like Daniel Penny taking matters into their own hand like a vigilante.

My uncle was a Marine who served on Iwo Jima in World War II. He would be horrified that a former Marine took the life of a person with a mental illness.

Coming up I’m going to give a lighter look at how to fight stigma courtesy of a holiday event I attended.