According to the website for the Grammarist, the proverb we have quoted for the title of today’s column “is a cynical twist on the idea that good people are rewarded for being good (when) in real life, this is often not the case. Many don’t understand that the ‘punishment’ may come from the person to whom you’ve done the good deed. You try to help someone, then they respond by hurting or betraying you.” This phrase “has been variously attributed to Walter Winchell, John P. Grier, Oscar Wilde, Andrew Mellon, and Clare Boothe Luce. One of the earliest known uses was during the 12th century, when Walter Map wrote the phrase, “left no good deed unpunished, no bad one unrewarded,” in his work ‘De nugis curialium.'”
No where has this fatalistic statement been proven to be more true, than in the cases of several individuals who have tried to stop crime in the New York City Subway system.
In May, we discussed the case of Daniel Penny, who was arrested and indicted by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg for Manslaughter and Criminally Negligent Homicide. What did Penny do to deserve these charges? As CNN describes the incident, “Penny held 30-year-old Jordan Neely in a chokehold during a May incident when Neely entered a subway car and began shouting at passengers. Neely died soon after, and the medical examiner ruled his death a homicide.”
Of course, there is far more to Neely’s actions than entering a subway car and shouting at passengers. In fact, eyewitness “Juan Alberto Vazquez said he was riding the subway when he saw a man, later identified as Neely, enter the car just as the doors were closing. Neely immediately launched into an aggressive rant about being ‘fed up and hungry’ and ‘tired of having nothing’…Vazquez quoted Neely as saying: ‘I don’t care if I die. I don’t care if I go to jail. I don’t have any food … I’m done.’ Neely then took off his coat and threw it on the floor and said he was ready to go to jail and get a life sentence…(m)any passengers became visibly uncomfortable and moved to other parts of the train car…(Penny) then approached Neely from behind and put him in a chokehold, Vazquez said.”
In October, Penny’s defense lawyers filed a motion to dismiss the charges based upon Neely’s violent and provocative behavior, and Penny’s justifiable efforts to stop Neely before he could hurt the other passengers on the train. How Penny could have been indicted in the first place is a mystery, given that “grand jury testimony from witnesses riding the subway during the incident (include) one of whom believed they were ‘going to die’…(t)hat unnamed witness, who said they have ridden the New York subway for six years, described the moment as ‘absolutely traumatizing,’ court documents say. . Another witness, a mother, said she took cover behind her stroller with her son to shield themselves from Neely, who was making ‘half-lunge movements’ and within ‘half a foot of people,’ the documents say.”
Several possible explanations for Bragg’s indictment of Penny are provided by the New York Times, “(t)he case has been politically volatile, involving issues that have polarized New Yorkers: violent incidents on the subway and the vulnerability of homeless and mentally ill people struggling through a crisis of affordability in an unequal city. It was also understood through the prism of race relations: Mr. Neely was Black and Mr. Penny is white.”
In any event, as of this writing, the motion to dismiss has not yet been decided by the New York State Supreme Court. But all the issues cited by the Times as contributing to the interest in the case still exist – particularly the problem of violence on the New York City subways.
Judge John Wilson’s (ret.) report concludes tomorrow
Illustration: Pixabay