4934

Dude got strangled all the way dead. The guy strangling kept strangling him for a minute after he definitively lost conscious.

Honestly wtf.

4935

Your position is that it’s acceptable for a civilian to strangle another civilian for acting erratically, and it’s acceptable to choke them until they stop moving, as long as they get off the body within a minute or two of the person losing all function.

4936

He doesn’t release Neely when Neely loses consciousness. He continues to strangle him for another full minute. He only stops when his stupid accomplice tells him to stop. By then Neely is dead. That minute killed him. But hey, Penny does retrieve his hat. Priorities!

Never mind that there’s no way Neely is a threat to anyone. The train is stopped at a station, the door is open. The only people on the car are a couple of people filming. Other people step in, then step out again. There’s no threat from Neely, and nobody for him to threaten. Everyone there could easily retreat and wait for the cops.

4937

I think the lack of malice is true but I also think that video is a text book example of the evidence for manslaughter. The Marine used a level of force that was deadly but did not appear to be aware of that, did not take precautions, did not check the guy’s breathing, did not do any fucking thing to ensure continuation of life until the guy was completely motionless (and dead). Although he was a Marine I would be highly surprised if he had any training or experience in non-lethal restraint.

The Marine did everything wrong

  • he attacked the airway as his critical hold point instead of a joint
  • he got behind and under the guy, failing to use his body weight and needing the help of two other people to hold the guy’s liimbs
  • he didn’t check to make sure the guy was breathing or check the airway after minutes of throat pressure, and after the guy crapped himself
  • he did not seem to be aware that the guy crapped himself or that crapping yourself is a sign of extreme distress (ie you are about to die)

I’ve never had professional training, just amateur training in martial arts in college and I have the advantage of being pretty heavy with a lot of upper body strength but I was trained a completely different, far less lethal way.

Bottom line, that was reckless use of deadly, assuming the use of force was justified in the first place.

So my view is, if the guy was in fact a threat, then this is manslaughter due to the use of deadly force without knowing what the fuck you are doing (hint if you are not an expert don’t fucking choke people unless you WANT to kill them - in fact even if you are an expert don’t fucking choke people - there are better methods). If the guy was NOT a threat sufficient to justify the initial tackle/restraint then this is just murder.

I don’t see a way to let the Marine walk here, now that I’ve seen the video.

He may not have started out with the intent to kill but his actions caused the death and he had ample opportunity to back off and let the guy breath.

And the idea that b/c the guy was “struggling” (to breathe, to live) justifies continuing to choke him out, I do not agree with that AT ALL. The Marine chose to use a chokehold, which is deadly force if continued for more than a few seconds. By using a chokehold for minutes, the Marine was using deadly force but it is clear to me that he did not know what he was doing. That recklessness, which combined with deadly force is manslaughter.

If the choice is between killing the guy and taking some risk on releasing him, you have to release him, full fucking stop. He was unarmed and massively outnumbered. If you take on the role of savior, that entails risk. You don’t get to say “Oh I might sprain my pinkie if I stop choking this man to death, so I must choke him to death!” And if you don’t KNOW that you are choking him to death then you shouldn’t MOTHERFUCKING be choking him in the first place.

4938

Follow up to the above:

There is one meta-factor that I do think should be considered to slightly reduce the Marine’s sentence, which is that we as a society bear some responsibility for the nonchalant attitude towards cutting off someone’s breathing. We’ve been conditioned to it by decades of lying TV shows and movies.

Part of me blames Hollywood. We pretend that clubbing people in the head and choking them out are easy and safe ways to restrain people or render them unconscious but they are not. Anything that impacts the brain or the airway carries a risk of death, full stop.

Our society needs to do a better job of being aware of that issue. I’m aware of it b/c of years of martials arts and decades of practicing workers’ comp laws (seemingly minor head injuries can cause major impacts) but I feel like our media lies to us continuously about head and airway trauma. Scripts often need an “easy KO” but easy KO’s don’t really exist except in very specialized circumstances.

4939

Indeed, you thought that he continued choking him for 15 minutes after he was unconscious, and learning that it was less than a minute, has zero impact on your opinion.

I think maybe it’s less about what actually happened, and more about a narrative that you’ve already created in your mind.

4940

What are you doing, man? Scoring points?

4941

Wasn’t the statement that he choked him for 15 minutes, not 15 minutes after the victim lost consciousness?

Anyway, how long is it appropriate to continue to strangle someone after they’ve clearly gone limp?

4942

Uh, dude.

4943

That is what one eyewitness said, and I pointed out that that is overkill. You only need 4 or 5 minutes to guarantee brain death, and honestly if you strangle someone for 3 minutes straight and then do not immediately perform CPR you have absolutely committed a murder.

4944

No, that’s the thing. The excuse for why this was obviously some horrific, malicious act, was that the Marine must have continued to strangle him for a long time after he lost consciousness.

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To which I was told:

And

And no, this is definitely not about winning some Internet points. It’s that maybe this Marine isn’t the terrible monster than some folks imagined him to be.

We recently had a discussion about the outrage porn pedaled by Fox. Fox isn’t the only one to do that. It’s not limited to the right wing.

This idea that the Marine intentionally killed this guy out of malice just doesn’t seem to hold up. Why assume he is a bad guy? To be clear, he totally might be a bad guy. But assuming these malicious factors, and then not even caring when you are shown that your beliefs were mistaken? What’s driving the judgement then? Why do we need for this Marine to be the bad guy? It’s the flip side of the weird coin that needs him to be the good guy.

He’s probably just a guy, who got into a bad situation, and maybe he committed crimes. But I think there’s an inclination to associate this guy with groups like abusive cops like the guy who killed George Floyd, and I don’t think there’s evidence that he’s that kind of person. He totally might be, and evidence of such might come out.

But we have to at least consider the actual evidence and base our opinions on it.

4945

I can’t begin to understand why you think that video is inconsistent with this statement. Neely lost consciousness, Penny kept choking him anyway, Neely died. It’s right there, on the video.

4946

Again, from the point where we can see him stop struggling, is less than a minute. And that’s from a low stress, third person perspective.

If you are wrapped around someone, struggling with them on the floor, behind them, you probably have a harder time assessing things.

And we see that when he’s told that the guy is out, he immediately lets go and gets off him.

I dunno man, if you think that supports your beliefs, I can’t tell you otherwise. You see it yourself. As long as you are basing your views on what you are seeing with your own eyes, that’s all that matters. There’s always going to be subjectivity.

4947

Yeah, he goes to fetch his hat, with zero evidence of concern for Neely’s condition.

4948

I’ll also point out that the report of the witnesses in the voice, clearly had them lying. They said that they got on the train, saw that the Marine was stangling Neely who was already unconscious, and then tried to pour water on Neely but was waved off and intimidated by the Marine. That definitely did not happen. That dude lied.

But people are reading these stories, and constructing narratives in their minds, and they aren’t real.

What I really want to see, is what happened before this stuff. Because the narratives that Neely was acting super aggressive could ALSO not be real. I want to know what actually happened.

4949

How much time is it acceptable to strangle someone for after they stop struggling?

4950

I think the time goes to support the idea that the Marine may not have actually known he was unconscious. There is some non zero amount of time that it would take to come to that realization, and I would suspect that grappling on the floor, behind the person, might make that harder.

4951

If he had stopped struggling, why continue to choke him, conscious or not?

4952

Fifty seconds is a very, very long time to hold that choke. You’re being disingenuous.

4953

I assure you I am not at all being disingenuous. Also, 50 seconds is just the longest time I can imagine, based on that video, because that’s when I see Neely stop making large kicking motions.

I feel like the guy holding his arm, looking at his face, probably had the best idea of exactly when he went unconscious. And as soon as he says so, the guy let’s go.
There is no evidence that he intended to continue choking an unconscious person. I can imagine that if I’ve been struggling on the floor of a subway with someone for 15 minutes, I might be tired, and I might not immediately recognize something like that.

Hell you can still judge him how you want, but the suggestions that were made here previously, as a basis for that judgement, are now known to definitely be false.