Thursday morning’s CNN News Central included two segments where anchor Rahel Solomon discussed the manslaughter indictment of Daniel Penny, a Marine veteran who detained an attacker, Jordan Neely, on a New York City subway, unfortunately causing Neely’s death in the process. Solomon and both of her guests, CNN national correspondent Brynn Gingras and Defense and Trial Attorney Misty Marris, all portrayed the event as if Penny had put an innocent “homeless street performer in a fatal chokehold,” with little context of the real situation provided.
The first segment featured Gingras’s New York reporting on the case, as the indictment was scheduled to be officially announced later in the day. Her report described the incident as if Neely, “a street artist…suffering from homelessness,” had entered the train and begun “shouting about being hungry, and thirsty, and he didn’t care if he needed to die.”