Whoopi Goldberg Blasts Daniel Penny's Celebration After Acquittal in Jordan Neely Death: 'You Killed a Guy'

Whoopi Goldberg has taken issue with Daniel Penny, the Marine veteran who was acquitted in the death of Jordan Neely, for celebrating his legal victory in public at a bar. During a segment of The View on Monday, Goldberg shared her discomfort over Penny's post-trial behavior.

Penny, 26, faced charges of second-degree manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide after putting Neely, a homeless subway performer, in a fatal chokehold on a New York City subway last year.

Penny's legal team argued he acted to protect passengers from what they described as Neely's erratic behavior. Prosecutors, however, claimed Penny used excessive force and failed to de-escalate the situation.

The case ended Monday with the jury finding Penny not guilty of criminally negligent homicide. A judge had already dismissed the second-degree manslaughter charge earlier in the proceedings. After the verdict, Penny was seen celebrating at a New York City watering hole alongside his legal team. It was a move that Goldberg said struck a sour note with her.

"I don't know that seeing them celebrating in a bar made me comfortable," she commented amid The View's "Hot Topics" segment, as Decider reported. "I mean, you killed a guy. The man is dead. Maybe you just take the celebration home. You don't do it outside. But that's just me. Don't listen to anything I say."

Goldberg also spoke about the broader societal issues that contributed to the tragedy, describing them as a cascade of failures. "There's failure all over here," she said. "There's failure in the system, failure on the part of the courts, failure on the parts of the hospitals, and failure on our part and how we deal with this."

Another The View co-host, Alyssa Farah Griffin, weighed in with a different perspective. She pointed to systemic problems in New York City as a key factor. "I think it is the city of New York who repeatedly fails people who could be a danger to themselves and others," she said. (Griffin, also a political strategist, was part of Donald Trump's administration in 2020 as Assistant to the President.)

The differing viewpoints about the incident and its aftermath have reignited debates about public safety, mental health, and how society handles these critical issues, something echoed in the banter on The View Monday.

Originally published on Enstarz.