Can Marine vet Daniel Penny break the Trayvon Curse?

On March 23. 2012, President Barack Obama yielded to pressure from black activists and weighed in on the shooting death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida, four weeks earlier.

The courageous step for Obama would have been to defend the Sanford Police Department and to demand an end to the media lynching of George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch captain who shot Martin in a desperate act of self-defense.

As an African American, Obama had more latitude to do this than a white politician would have. He chose not to. Concluded Obama after some meaningless temporizing: “But my main message is to the parents of Trayvon – if I had a son, he would look like Trayvon.”

In immediate response to Zimmerman’s acquittal on murder charges in July 2013, a trio of Marxist feminists launched the entity known as “Black Lives Matter.” With Obama’s tacit blessing, BLM made race-based mob justice the law of the land.

Before the Trayvon curse, the Left’s long-term legal strategy was to make martyrs out of the transparently guilty. Starting with Zimmerman, leftists proved willing to make scapegoats out of the obviously innocent, a dark turn in American jurisprudence that has gone almost unnoticed.

For the next 10 years after Zimmerman’s trial, the Trayvon curse haunted every case in which a person who looked like Obama died at the hands of someone who did not. “White Hispanics” – a New York Times neologism invented to describe Zimmerman – were not immune.

On May 1, 2023, the curse descended on 24-year-old Marine veteran Daniel Penny. On that day, according to the New York Times, Penny “put a homeless man in a chokehold in a subway car.”

On Monday of this week, Penny went on trial on charges of manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide in Manhattan Supreme Court. Curiously, the Times article cited above did not mention that Penny was white or his victim, the 30-year-old Jordan Neely, black.

They didn’t have to. By 2023, most people paying attention knew that the only reason the story made the news was because of the white-on-black nature of the “crime.”

Besides, the prominent photo of the tall, blond Penny spoke louder than words. As to Neely, the Times told the reader that he was a “Michael Jackson impersonator,” a description that painted him as both black and benign.

Black he was. Benign he was not. What the Times did not tell the reader borders on malpractice, including the fact that Neely had been previously convicted for 44 crimes, among them rape, violent assault and attempted kidnapping of a 7-year-old girl.

Neely did not get a chance to commit his 45th. When Neely began screaming he was going to kill the other passengers, claiming he did not fear prison and was ready to die, Penny intervened.

Two of his fellow passengers helped Penny subdue the violently resisting Michael Jackson impersonator.

“The killing polarized New York,” claimed the Times. No, not really. It may have polarized the class that travels by Uber and taxi, but it has not polarized subway riders. To them, regardless of race, Penny is a hero.

Forty years prior, before the Trayvon curse clouded race relations, a mild-mannered white subway rider named Bernhard Goetz shot four black youths who were harassing passengers including himself. Although all survived, one was permanently paralyzed.

By and large, New Yorkers, especially subway riders, considered Goetz a hero. Local news broadcasts show citizens black and white openly expressing their support for the “subway vigilante.” Race barely seemed an issue.

At his trial, a New York City jury acquitted Goetz of attempted murder, assault, reckless endangerment and found him guilty of just one count of carrying an unlicensed firearm.

In 2024, Penny faces a fear-soaked jury and a 15-year prison sentence if found guilty of doing what any U.S. Marine – any real man for that matter – should have done.

Like former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, Penny stands accused of suppressing a violent career criminal a tad too long. Tried before a frightened jury, Chauvin is now serving a 22-year prison sentence.

Although Penny’s trial will last six weeks, a Trump victory in the November election two weeks hence may help break the spell of the Trayvon curse.

Like Zimmerman and Chauvin and Penny, Trump has been indicted multiple times to appease the leftist mobs. MAGA America understands this implicitly. Here’s hoping New Yorkers finally catch on.

Jack Cashill’s book “Ashli: The Untold Story of the Women of January 6,” is available in all formats.