Former Marine and, by all accounts of those who know and worked with him, a good-hearted and compassionate human being, Danny Penny is being railroaded by the typically two-tiered faux justice system of New York City District Attorney’s Office for restraining a drugged-crazed, homicidal denizen of New York’s coddled criminal community.
In martial arts and in former police academy training the “Naked Stranglehold” was taught specifically for obtaining submission. In L.A. the technique was taught in response to the incredible strength of suspects under the influence of PCP. Once a suspect died after being subdued by that technique, the media and the Left automatically jumped to the conclusion it was the “chokehold” that caused the death.
There is more to determining the nexus between the use of the choke hold and a suspect’s death than just both occurring in proximity of time.
Fellow subway victims of the maggot’s mania camera videos of Penny’s restraint is very instructive to the trained eye. For anyone who has been trained in the chokehold technique in martial arts and/or police academies, and used it in life and death situations, there is one obvious fault with the conclusion drawn by the District Attorney’s office.
The video shows Penny’s left arm around the maggot’s neck while the maggot struggles for several minutes flailing his arms and legs. The benefit of the choke hold is that when properly applied it instantaneously cuts off oxygen to the brain rendering the suspect / opponent unconscious. This quickly eliminates the threat / opposition. While the suspect is temporarily unconscious the officer can roll the suspect onto his stomach and handcuff him without resistance or harm to the officer. It is quickly and easily apparent if the choke hold is effective by the immediate cessation of resistance by the suspect. This happens well within the four to five minutes of oxygen deprivation causing permanent brain damage or death.
It was very apparent from the video that Penny was not properly applying the choke hold because the maggot continued to flail for several minutes. The maggot’s head was down and Penny’s arm was completely visible. If Penny had applied the choke hold properly, the maggot’s head would have been up and half of Penny’s arm would have been hidden under the maggot’s chin. The very slight pressure required for cutting off the carotid supply of oxygen to the brain would have been obvious in the instantaneous cessation of the maggot flailing about. If the choke hold was applied effectively, the maggot would have been trying to grab Penny’s arm away from his throat – that’s a universal survival instinct. The maggot did not do this. His chin was blocking proper application of the choke hold – it wasn’t choking him at all.
If the choke hold is misapplied and pressure is applied horizontally across the throat the hyoid bone is usually crushed. This in itself is only fatal in one third of injuries to that bone. Was the maggot’s hyoid bone crushed?
From what is visible in the video, there is doubt as to whether there is any trauma to the maggot’s neck at all.
As the maggot Penny was ineffectively trying to restrain had a pulse for several minutes after he released his hold (seriously casting doubt on proximate cause), there is another viable medical cause for the maggot’s demise:
“Over the past decade, the Excited Delirium Syndrome (ExDS) has raised continued controversy regarding the cause and manner of death of some highly agitated persons held in policy custody, restrained or incapacitated by electrical devices. At autopsy, medical examiners have difficulty identifying an anatomic cause of death, but frequently cite psychostimulant intoxication as a contributing factor.
The characteristic symptoms of ExDS include bizarre and aggressive behavior , shouting, paranoia, panic, violence toward others, unexpected physical strength, and hyperthermia [exactly the same symptoms as the PCP occurrences in the ’70s].
Throughout the U.S. and Canada, these cases are most frequently associated with cocaine, methamphetamine, and designer cathinone abuse. Acute exhaustive mania and sudden death presents with behavioral symptoms that are identical to what is described for ExDS in psychostimulant abusers.
Bell’s mania, or Acute Exhaustive Mania, was first described in the 1850’s by American psychiatrist Luther Bell in institutionalized psychiatric patients [before Liberals emptied the asylums and let them loose on the streets of America]. This rare disorder of violent mania, elevated body temperature and autonomic collapse continued to be described by others in the psychiatric literature, but with different names until the first cases of ExDS were seen at the beginning of the cocaine epidemic by medical examiners.
…. While the precise cause and mechanism of lethality remains controversial, the likely whys and wherefores of sudden death of ExDS persons are seen to be ‘biological‘; since excessive dopamine in the brain triggers the manic excitement and delirium , which, unabated, culminates in a loss of autonomic function that progresses to cardiorespiratory collapse.” (See: National Institute of Health National Library of Medicine, PubMed Central; Frontiers in Physiology dated October 13, 2016; Excited Delirium and Sudden Death: A Syndromal Disorder at the Extreme End of the Neuropsychiatric Continuum)
In the late ’70s I lived in Glendale, California a suburb of Los Angeles. I had been a police officer and am a Life member of the U.S. Judo Association. In my competitive years, the “Naked Stranglehold” was restricted in competition to those with brown belts or higher. One night after returning from the gym, I looked out my second story apartment bedroom window to the intersection below. I saw a man sitting on a wall near the crosswalk. He got off the wall and walked straight toward the parking space below my apartment. That was where my girlfriend parked her car. There was a narrow alley running along the back of the building where the first floor bedroom windows were.
I saw him look down that alley and I hurried out the front door of my apartment. He had walked around to the front of the building down the driveway and was angling toward the other end of the building where my red, ’68 Camaro was parked under the apartment the opposite end of mine. I hopped down the stairs and followed him around the corner. I rounded the corner in time to see him heading toward the alley behind the first floor apartments. He heard me coming and diverted toward the adjacent driveway and out to the street.
Before he arrived at the back end of the apartment I saw him come out from the bushes adjacent to my girlfriend’s and her mother’s living room window. She and her mother routinely went about their apartment “lightly” dressed or, well, nude (it was the ’70s!). As I saw the man divert to the adjacent driveway, knowing he intended to peep into their bedroom windows in the alley, I decided to detain him and call the police.
As I approached him on the sidewalk in the dark, he became significantly bigger. By the time I got behind him I had to hop up a bit to put my foot into the back of his knee to bring him down to my size. Once he was “shorter,” I used his thick, cotton “shirt jacket” collars to try choking him out. I was on my back on the ground with his back to me while pulling his collars tight around his neck. An elderly couple pulled up to the traffic light and stared down at us struggling on the ground – then drove off.
Within a few seconds the big oaf stopped struggling. When he came to I told him if he quit resisting I would let him stand up and go with me. I walked him to my girlfriend’s front door with his right arm locked behind him. I had to tilt him backwards a bit to reach and maintain control of his collar behind his neck. Arriving at her door, I made him kneel down on the steps to her small porch and kicked her door. When she opened the door I asked “Is this the guy that was looking in your windows?” She had told me of a man doing that twice before.
When she said “Yes,” I told her to call the police. He suddenly stood up, turned to face me and was reaching into his right jacket pocket. I executed a judo foot sweep (Da Ishi Harai) to get him on the ground then applied the choke hold on him from behind. I made him do the “funky chicken” twice before I finally put him out and he quit fighting. I rolled him over and put his hands behind his back. While I was choking him, my girlfriend and her mother came out of their apartment. She was holding a large carving knife at his throat but it was also about an inch from my wrist. Her mother was holding a 1″ wooden dowel over his head like a sledgehammer.
Sitting on top of his unconscious carcass, I searched his pockets and pulled a nine inch switchblade out of his right pocket – the one he was trying to pull on me. Two Glendale officers arrived with weapons drawn telling me to get off him. I explained the situation and they cuffed him and took him to jail.
He was wanted in a string of burglaries and rapes in the city. He was married with three children and lived two blocks from us.
Hopefully, Penny’s defense is smart enough to have martial arts experts in the choke hold and someone familiar with Bell’s Syndrome testify at his trial – if the New York City legal system still allows self defense in their courtrooms.
