Penny’s defense team paid an expert witness, Dr Satish Chundru, nearly $100,000 to testify at the trial, which had a mostly white jury composed of seven women and five men. By the time Chundru took the stand, the facts of Neely’s death were clear. Neely entered an uptown F train on 1 May 2023 and, clearly in distress, began yelling that he was hungry, thirsty and ready to go to jail. Less than 30 seconds later, Penny had Neely in a chokehold called “the blood choke” that Penny’s own marine trainer testified was used improperly by the ex-marine. That specific chokehold will render a person unconscious after only 13 seconds, the Marine Corps martial arts instructor testified, at which point one should stop.
Penny held Neely in the chokehold for about six minutes, including a full 50 seconds after Neely had gone limp.
Both common sense and medical science would dictate precisely what the medical examiner found. Neely’s cause of death was asphyxiation due to Penny’s chokehold. But that’s not what Dr Chundru determined.
According to Chundru, Neely died of a mix of factors: his schizophrenia, drugs in his system, and the fact that he was a carrier of a genetic trait called sickle cell. “This is not a chokehold death,” Chundru
testified.
And here’s the problem. Sickle cell trait is an inherited and normally asymptomatic blood condition that mostly means the person with the trait is simply a carrier of a specific gene. I’m personally a carrier of a related condition called thalassemia. (Full-blown sickle cell disease requires two sickle cell genes, not just the one carried by those who have sickle cell trait.) There is simply no good scientific evidence that the sickle cell trait plays any role in choking deaths. The American Society of Hematology even warns that deaths attributed to sickle cell crisis “must be viewed with profound skepticism”.
Now take a guess which population in the United States most often carries the sickle cell trait? Upwards of 10% of African Americans are carriers of the gene, far and away more than any other population in this country (and
more than 90% of those with full-blown sickle cell disease in the United States are Black people). In 2021, the New York Times
investigated the dubious practice of blaming the deaths of Black men at the hands of law enforcement on the sickle cell trait, finding at least 46 instances in what “was almost certainly an undercount”.
This racially marked determination is very similar to the finding of “excited delirium”, another racially coded finding used by authorities around the country. “Excited delirium” is a diagnosis not found in the DSM, the standard classification of mental disorders used by mental health professionals in the United States, but that hasn’t stopped the authorities from invoking it. As Columbia University’s Dr Paul Applebaum
explains, excited delirium “has been used to explain fatalities of people in police custody, especially deaths of young Black men, and to exculpate police officers from responsibility”.
What findings of “excited delirium” and “sickle cell trait” both do is pathologize Black people, especially Black men, by turning their own bodies against them in a court of law. The news site Gothamist understood this in a report filed from Penny’s trial. Penny’s lawyers, Gothamist
reported, “argued that [Neely’s] own cells starved him of oxygen – not their client’s arm wrapped around his neck”.
www.theguardian.com
