Another round of lake effect snow to hit Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York: Latest

(NEW YORK) — Judge Maxwell Wiley has dismissed the top charge of second-degree manslaughter against Daniel Penny in the death of Jordan Neely at the request of prosecutors after considering declaring a mistrial after jurors reported they continue to be deadlocked on the charge.

He said he will encourage the jury to continue deliberating on Monday the lesser charge of whether Penny committed criminally negligent homicide in the death of Neely, a homeless man, on the New York City subway last year.

Defense attorney Thomas Kenniff opposed the move, arguing the move could lead to a “coercive or a compromised verdict.” He again encouraged the judge to declare a mistrial.

This leaves the jury to deliberate the lesser count of criminally negligent homicide.

“Whether that makes any difference or not I have no idea,” Wiley said.

Penny, a 25-year-old former Marine, put Neely, a 30-year-old homeless man, in a six-minute-long chokehold after Neely boarded a subway car acting erratically, according to police. Witnesses described Neely yelling and moving erratically, with Penny’s attorneys calling Neely “insanely threatening” when Penny put Neely in a chokehold.

The city’s medical examiner concluded Penny’s chokehold killed Neely.

He was initially charged with both manslaughter and negligent homicide charges. He pleaded not guilty to both.

The jury sent two notes repeating that they could not come to a unanimous conclusion on the count.

Wiley suggested giving the jury a second Allen charge, and he gave the lawyers more time to think about next steps.

In its first note of the day, the jury in Penny’s manslaughter and negligent homicide trial reported that it is “unable to come to a unanimous vote” on whether Penny committed second-degree manslaughter.

“We the jury request instructions from Judge Wiley. At this time, we are unable to come to a unanimous vote on court one,” the note said.

Wiley gave the jury an Allen charge, which refers to the jury instructions given to a hung jury that encourages them to continue deliberating despite the deadlock. He is giving the lawyers time to consider the next steps.

Penny’s lawyer, Thomas Kenniff, unsuccessfully moved for a mistrial, arguing that the Allen Charge would be “coercive.”

Wiley disagreed, saying that it was “too early” to declare a mistrial before encouraging the jury to continue their deliberations.

The verdict form asks the jury to decide the first count – second-degree manslaughter – before potentially moving to the second count of criminally negligent homicide. Only if it finds Penny not guilty on the first count, can it consider the second count of criminally negligent homicide.

The second-degree manslaughter charge only required prosecutors to have proven Penny acted recklessly, not intentionally.

“It would be a crazy result to have a hung jury just because they can’t move on to the second count?” prosecutor Dafna Yoran said.

Yoran also told Wiley that a new trial would “ultimately [be] the case if they hang the case.”

Wiley left unanswered the question about whether the jury could move onto the second count if they are unable to reach a verdict on the first count. He said he believed the jury moving to the second count is possible but needs to find the legal authority to do so.

“I think ultimately we are going to have to answer the question of whether they can move to count two,” he said.

Twenty minutes after the judge encouraged them to continue deliberating despite their deadlock, the jury sent back another note requesting more information about the term “reasonable person” in their instructions.

“Ultimately, what a reasonable person is up to you to decide,” Wiley told the jury in response to their note, referring them to a two-part test in jury instruction.

“Would a reasonable person have had the same honestly held belief as the defendant given the circumstances and what the defendant knew at that time?” Wiley asked, referring to the second part of the test.

Before the jury entered, Wiley noted how the “reasonableness” standard was established in People v. Goetz – another high-profile New York trial after Bernhard Goetz shot four teenagers on a New York subway in 1984 after they allegedly tried to rob him. A New York jury convicted Goetz for one count of carrying an unlicensed firearm but acquitted on the more severe charges, and the trial sparked a nationwide debate about race and crime that has echoed forty years later in Penny’s case.

Copyright © 2024, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

(NEW YORK) — Homicides across the United States are poised to plummet for the third straight year as 2024 winds down, driving the nation’s annual murder toll down to levels not seen since before the pandemic, according to preliminary data from cities both large and small.

Based on available crime statistics from U.S. law enforcement agencies, the year is expected to end with a nearly 16% drop in homicides nationwide and a 3.3% decline in overall violent crime, Jeff Asher, a national crime analyst, told ABC News.

The dramatic drop in homicides surpasses a 13% decline in 2023, then the largest decrease on record until now. In 2022, the number of murders across the country fell 6%, according to the FBI.

The three consecutive years of declining homicides come in the wake of 30% jump in murders between 2019 and 2020, the largest single-year increase in more than a century.

“Considering where we were just three or four years ago, we’re basically looking at 5,000 fewer murder victims than in 2020, 2021 and 2022 having occurred in 2024,” said Asher, co-founder of AH Datalytics and a former crime analyst for the CIA and the New Orleans Police Department.

In contrast, a dozen major U.S. cities broke annual homicide records in 2021.

Philadelphia — which recorded an all-time high of 562 homicides in 2021, 516 in 2022 and 410 last year — has seen a 40% drop in homicides in 2024.

Other major cities seeing precipitous reductions in homicides this year are New Orleans, down 38%; Washington, D.C., down 29%; Memphis, Tennessee, down 23%; Baltimore, down 24%; Kansas City, Missouri, down 20%; and Los Angeles, down 15%.

New York City, the nation’s largest city, had recorded 357 homicides through Dec. 15, a 7.3% drop from 2023, according to New York Police Department crime statistics. The city — which tallied 442 murders in 2020, a 45% jump from 2019 — has seen homicides fall 15% over the past two years.

Chicago has recorded a 7% decline in homicides as of Dec. 15, down from 603 murders at this time last year, according to the Chicago Police Department’s crime data. Over the past three years, homicides in Chicago have fallen 29% after skyrocketing 55% between 2019 and 2020 to 769 murders.

Homicides this year in 63 cities with populations of more than 250,000 declined by at least 15% and murders were down at least 19% in 246 cities with populations under 250,000, Asher’s research found.

“It’s a tremendous achievement in terms of how far murder has fallen in just really two straight years,” Asher said.

Property crime plummets

In addition to violent crime falling, property crime is also poised to finish the year down 8.6% nationwide, mostly due to a 21.4% decrease in motor vehicle theft, Asher said.

“Auto thefts went up 12% last year. They’re coming down more than 20% this year,” said Asher, who added that the 2023 spike in car thefts appears to be tied to social media instruction videos on how to steal certain models of Kias and Hyundais.

Crunching the numbers

Since 2016, Asher has crunched the numbers for an end-of-the-year report on crime trends. This year, his report is based on preliminary crime statistics from 309 U.S. law enforcement agencies, the most data he has ever received.

Asher’s analysis aligns closely with data released in May by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showing murders down 14%. The Gun Violence Archive, a website that tracks all shootings across the nation, shows homicides are down around 11%.

“We kind of put all those together and we see a very large decline in murder, a very large decline in gun violence happening in the U.S. in 2024 on top of what was a very large decline in murder and a very large decline in gun violence in 2023,” Asher said.

Referring to overall violent crime, Asher said, “You’re probably looking at, if not the lowest violent crime rate since 1970, certainly at or around where we were pre-pandemic.”

Besides homicide, rape was down 4.5% from 2023, robberies fell 1.1% and aggravated assaults declined 3.7%, according to Asher.

The falling numbers come amid a backdrop of high-profile violent crimes in 2024, including more than 400 mass shootings, two assassination attempts on President-elect Donald Trump and the fatal shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson allegedly by 26-year-old Ivy League graduate Luigi Mangione, who police suspect was out to strike fear in the insurance industry.

The numbers also come just days after a 15-year-old girl allegedly carried out a shooting rampage at her Christian school in Madison, Wisconsin, killing a teacher and a classmate, and injured six other students before dying from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, police said.

The Wisconsin shooting came three months after a 14-year-old boy allegedly killed two students and two teachers, and injured nine others at his high school in Winder, Georgia, with an AR-style weapon police alleged his father gave him as a Chrismas present.

‘We have turned the tide against violent crime’

During a Dec. 10 briefing of the Justice Department’s Violence Crime Reduction Steering Committee meeting, Attorney General Merrick Garland said preliminary crime data showed significant declines in violent crime in 85 cities in 2024, including a 17.5% drop in homicides nationwide.

“Over the past two years, we have turned the tide against the violent crime that spiked during the pandemic,” Garland said.

He said the numbers build on the historic drop in homicides nationwide last year, which he said was the lowest level of violent crime in 50 years.

Merrick attributed the tumbling violent crime rate partly to the DOJ’s Violent Crime Reduction Roadmap, a one-stop-shop created to assist local jurisdictions in developing, implementing and evaluating the strategies to prevent, intervene and respond to acts of community gun violence.

President Joe Biden’s administration has also sought to curb gun violence in recent years through executive actions and signing into law in 2022 the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which enhanced background checks for gun buyers under the age of 21, allocated $750 million to help states implement “red flag laws” to remove firearms from people deemed dangerous to themselves and others.

Biden also established the in 2023 the first-ever White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention to focus on ways to assist states and cities reduce the nation’s epidemic of gun violence.

Some cities such as Philadelphia have credited the work of violence interrupter programs, community-based initiatives that use peacebuilding methods to head off incidents of violence before they occur.

In Philadelphia, city leaders also pointed to a $184 million investment in gun violence initiatives in 2022, including one that attempts to identify people who are at risk of being involved in violence to provide them with mental health services or job placement. While the city also boosted the Philadelphia Police Department’s budget that year by $30 million, it instituted a violence prevention plan that emphasizes a combination of law enforcement strategies, environmental improvements and youth programs to reduce its homicide numbers.

“We need to continue pressing forward with our comprehensive approach, which is prevention, intervention and enforcement,” Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker said at a Nov. 1 news conference on the city’s falling homicide numbers.

In October, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul signed six bills to strengthen New York’s gun laws, including one requiring gun sellers to post tobacco-style safety warnings and another that cracks down on illegal devices called “switches” that convert semiautomatic handguns into automatic weapons.

Asher said that in 2020 and 2021 when violent crime rose to alarming levels, programs such as community violence interruptors didn’t exist and the budgets of many police departments were getting slashed in the defund-the-police movement stemming from nationwide protests over the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Asher said states and local governments, as well as philanthropies, are pumping money into programs to bring down violent crime.

“Some of that is undoubtedly contributing to what we’re seeing now,” Asher said. “I’m not naïve enough to suggest that that’s the entire explanation. There are undoubtedly a multitude of factors that help to explain this complex problem.”

ABC News’ Calvin Milliner contributed to this report.

Copyright © 2024, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

(WASHINGTON) — The Washington Commanders may be one step closer to returning to their old stadium in Washington, D.C. after congressional leaders included a provision in the short-term government funding bill released Tuesday to transfer the jurisdiction of the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium site from the federal government to local District of Columbia authorities.

D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser celebrated the provision, calling it a “giant step forward” and that she is “looking to the future of a field of possibilities.”

House Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. James Comer (R-Tenn.) said in a statement Tuesday the legislation “will unlock the district’s full potential, generate meaningful new jobs, and add millions in additional city revenue for the nation’s capital.”

He added, “Now is the time to get the federal government out of the way and empower local officials to clean up the RFK site, invest and create new economic opportunities.”

This provision would allow the Commanders to negotiate the construction of a new stadium where the RFK site is located.

The measure comes after NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell and Commanders Managing Partner Josh Harris met with leaders on Capitol Hill regarding the stadium proposal earlier this month.

The Washington football team played at the RFK site in D.C. for decades before moving to nearby Landover, Maryland, in a newly built stadium in the late 1990s. Since then, RFK Stadium has fallen into disrepair.

While a potential move for the Commanders would be a big loss for Maryland, the government funding bill included major wins for the state including the transfer of fighter jets — the D.C. Air National Guard squadron — and full federal funding to rebuild the Francis Scott Key Bridge.

Both chambers of Congress are expected to vote on the funding bill this week to avert a government shutdown.

Copyright © 2024, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.