Wednesday, December 18, 2024

Part I

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There are Deeply Troubled People Among Us: The Daniel Penny and Jordan Neely Case Raises Massive Mental Health Issues in NYC and Beyond

Much of America was fascinated and quite pleased just a matter of days ago when Daniel Penny was found not guilty of charges that had been brought against him by the district attorney in Manhattan related to the death of Jordan Neely on a subway car after an incident that had led to a chokehold being applied by the former Marine, Daniel Penny, and it eventually led to the death of Jordan Neely. The district attorney in Manhattan charged Penny with criminal charges, including at least two major felony charges. One of them was dropped after the jury said it was deadlocked. A lesser charge was allowed, but just a matter of hours later, the jury basically came back and rendered a not guilty verdict.

And so, the immediate story came down to the fact that the jury had acquitted a man who had killed another man on a subway car, but it was ruled, at least in the view of the jury, to have been justified given the circumstances of the fact that Jordan Neely presented a clear and present danger. And thus, when Daniel Penny, the former Marine on a subway car under the surface of New York City, put Jordan Neely in a chokehold, even when that led to Jordan Neely’s death, there was no appropriate criminal charge to be brought against Daniel Penny.

The basic facts of the case are very well-known. Jordan Neely had been known to police authorities and transportation authorities there in New York City for some time because he had been arrested numerous times for various violations. He was known to be suffering from psychiatric problems. He had a deep personal struggle. He was a very large man. And on the day that he died because of this chokehold, at least that is what police understand, in the very day, he had gone onto the subway area and then into a subway car and was acting in a way that indicated some kind of psychotic break or something similar to that.

It was behavior that scared many people on the subway car. And when you had the former Marine, Daniel Penny, take action and take him in a chokehold in order to restrain him, it did eventually lead to his death. But basically, that was found to have been an act that in some degree, to a greater extent was justified given the perception of threat in that circumstance.

Okay. But we knew all of that a matter of days ago. We’re returning to the issue now simply because of what the conversation about the jury’s verdict says and the aftermath of the conversation about the entire episode. It’s very interesting to see the worldview issues that arise here. And in particular, there’s also a history that most of the mainstream media have not recounted, but really is important to this consideration, because we’re talking about a situation that is hardly unprecedented in America’s major cities and in particular in the city of New York. We are talking about a problem that increasingly has led to all kinds of anxieties on the part of people living in many of these cities, but let’s just speak specifically about New York City. And we’re talking about a problem that isn’t going to go away. It’s going to come back again and again and again.

So, at this point, it’s simply safe to say that Jordan Neely was known to be suffering from any number of psychological or psychiatric problems. It had led to numerous arrests. It had led to numerous encounters. It led to numerous incidents in which anti-social behavior, even threatening behavior, sometimes even just kind of flamboyantly loud behavior, had caught the attention of people in the subway system and the transport authority, and that includes the police.

But there’s a large story behind this with massive worldview implications, and that has to do with the fact that some people estimate that as many as say, 10 to 20,000 persons with similar profiles are found on the streets of New York at any given time, and you’re talking about a widespread problem of psychiatric disorders that have led to criminal behaviors. And you have so many of these people who are apprehended, sometimes they’re hospitalized and put under treatment for a limited period of time, but then they are returned to the streets of New York where the same cycle happens again and again and again.

How in the world does this happen? Well, there’s a fascinating story behind it with massive worldview implications. The most important parts of the story behind it have to do with the history of psychiatric treatment in the United States and the rise of a new level of civil liberties recognized by the courts. And if you take the second one first, the courts increasingly have been ruling over the past several decades for an increased interpretation of the civil liberties that cannot be infringed upon even if one is living on the streets of New York, harassing people on the subway and repeatedly showing up with threatening behaviors. The idea here is that there must be a sufficient reason to hold someone in terms of any kind of involuntary custody. And there’s a reality behind that, which is that there are not enough psychiatric beds and hospitals to handle all the people on the streets of New York who need that kind of treatment.

The other big issue though has to do with why society puts someone like Jordan Neely back on the streets again and again and again, and that gets to a massive change in the treatment of psychiatric and psychological problems in the United States. So, let’s go back before the problem as it currently stands. How was society arranged when this kind of thing was less common? Well, it was arranged in such a way that there were basically asylums or institutions where people who had shown this kind of psychiatric problem and certainly this kind of antisocial behavior were sent, without their consent usually, and they were institutionalized there for a very long period of time. Some of them basically spent the rest of their adult lives in some form of institutional care, which was legally defined as some kind of institutional captivity.

All that began to change with two developments. Both of them come with a lot of worldview implications. One of them was an increased understanding and demand for the civil liberties of persons who would be committed to these institutions to be recognized so that they were not permanently housed as if they were guilty of say, a criminal charge. They could not just be classified as a danger to their neighbors. There had to be a kind of specific criminal charge after a specific criminal act that had to be dealt with on those terms. So, you basically had just a lot of people turned onto the streets of America’s major cities.

The second big development had to do with the fact that society began to say that the problem of psychiatric or psychological illnesses regardless of how they are defined, that is not an adequate reason to put someone into an involuntary restraint or some kind of involuntary captivity or even involuntary treatment. And so, the rise of patient or personal consent became a huge issue. You try to go to the emergency room these days, you have to sign all kinds of consent lines in order to be treated for something even if it’s a minor injury. Consent is now one of the major issues in law, and that includes the law of medical treatment.

So, over the course of the last half of the 20th century, it became harder and harder for society to say, “This is a deeply troubled person that needs to be kept away from the general population. We will put this person in some kind of mental treatment facility or psychiatric treatment facility.” And more and more, there was the affirmation that the only way someone could be held captive against his or her will is if they had committed some kind of serious criminal act. But at the same time, there was an inflation in terms of that definition because even as jails got more and more filled, and the courts became more and more complex, it became more and more common that you had an inflation in terms of this kind of crime that would lead to this kind of confinement.

I mean, frankly, the courts have become so lenient in many cases that people are basically arrested, arraigned, and then turned pretty much right back on the streets. And that’s what takes us to that subway car and eventually to the action by Daniel Penny against the threat of Jordan Neely that led to Jordan Neely’s death.

In a city like New York, and New York’s important because it is the paradigmatic big city, megalopolis, of the United States, and given its history, it has a long tradition and history of dealing with this kind of issue. One turning point came in the late 1980s when in 1987, Ed Koch, who was the mayor of New York at the time, he wanted to apply the law in New York in such a way that he could take those that were referred to as the loonies and the crazies off the street. And that’s because there were a lot of people who weren’t coming to New York or were working in New York and said they were afraid to go to work, to walk on the streets, to take the subway because there were so many people on the streets who were demonstrating threatening behavior.

Adam Iscoe writing for The New Yorker tells us about the impact of this policy, “Almost every patient who comes in this way has a serious underlying condition, bipolar disorder, major depression, schizophrenia, that even a couple of weeks surrounded by nurses, doctors, and social workers cannot fix. In the late ’80s,” he continues, “following a legal challenge to Mayor Koch’s involuntary hospitalization initiative one judge described the city’s approach as, ‘revolving door mental health. That is forcibly institutionalize, forcibly medicate, stabilize, discharge back into the same environment, and then repeat the cycle.'” 

Almost immediately, you have the fear on the part of many people in New York City that dangerous persons, dangerous to themselves and to others, are being routinely released onto the streets of New York. The New Yorker report comes down to this, “The hospitals keep letting them go because they often have to. Patients can always refuse treatment or ask to be released. Compelling someone to stay requires a court order from a judge, and the legal standard is high. The hospital must prove that the patient poses an immediate threat to himself or others, and that this judgment is so impaired by his illness that he doesn’t even understand that he needs help.” 

Now, in worldview terms, behind all of this is, well, a frank understanding that there are deeply troubled people amongst us, and that is something we all have to recognize. And I think all of us recognize consistent with the biblical worldview that every part of us can be affected in such a way that it can lead to a distortion and a corruption. And we certainly see that when it comes to the phenomena that are described here. We also understand, however, that in a secular age, there has been an attempt to try to define all these things in purely secular terms. And one of those secular dimensions is the rise of the cult of the therapeutic. And at the same time, you have the rise of the cult of civil liberty in such a way that you describe people as being sick, but they have to be incredibly sick in order for someone to be held or restricted from being a part of the general population.

And so, we really are looking at a fascinating war of ideas here, but we’re also talking about real-world consequences, and that takes us to the real-world situation of what took place on that subway car and eventually the jury finding not guilty and he was released. That doesn’t end the issue. The first thing Christians need to recognize here is that there is something real to a lot of these diagnoses. The second thing Christians have to understand is that the diagnosis only scratches the surface of the problem.

And so, as you see a secular society trying to deal with these very deep and problematic syndromes, you look at them trying to deal with people who are clearly deeply troubled, people who are a threat to themselves and to others. You match that with the civil libertarian worldview of the last half of the 20th century, and you have people who are understood to be threats to themselves and potentially to others who were just put back on the streets again and again and again. And you have the giant cities of the nation that become collecting points. Again, by some estimations, there are something like a quarter of a million persons with some kind of similar diagnosis in a city or a metropolitan region like New York City. And at any given time, between 10 and 20,000 of them might present a clear and present danger to themselves or others.

Part of the problem here is the conception of personal autonomy and individual liberty that is being held up by so many jurists, and frankly, by so much of the intellectual Left in the United States. Heather Mac Donald writing at City Journal gets it right when she says, “Jordan Neelys are still roaming New York streets because protecting their autonomy is government’s paramount concern. Nevermind that the autonomy of the law-abiding is proportionately restricted. Many New Yorkers,” she writes, “now avoid the subways, losing access to a vital public service that they’re paying for simply because government refuses to maintain order.” And remember, that is one of the first assignments of government is to maintain order. A failure to maintain order is one of the most basic failures of government.

I wanted to return to this issue today simply because of the huge issues here. And we all have to admit these issues are very complex. There’s no easy way to deal with these problems. And even as Christians understand that the reliance upon psychiatry alone is a very problematic position. We also recognize there are some very serious psychiatric and psychological problems that are very much walking the streets of a city like New York, or frankly, walking down the sidewalks even closer to us than we might recognize. The reality is that we are living in an age, however, that has no explanation for these things except the psychiatric or the psychological, the sociological, or following some other secular worldview. And clearly, those secular worldviews fail to explain with any adequacy the reality of this challenge.

Part II

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President Biden’s Reckless Clemency Commutations: President Biden Grants Shocking and Controversial Clemency Commutations

But I’m going to leave that at this point and get to another issue. A lot of controversy in recent days and this controversy is likely to continue, because remind yourself for just a moment that Joe Biden is still president of the United States. He still has the constitutional authority to act. And remember that days ago, he acted to commute 1,500 criminal sentences at one time, 1,500. It was the largest commutation in the history of the American presidency. There had been some mass commutations before, but generally they had been because of a change in an understanding of the law.

Now, instead, what you basically had in the case of President Biden’s commutation of at least a lot of the 1,500 sentences here, is the fact that many of these people, because of the situation in COVID, had been put into some form of home confinement. And Joe Biden came back and said, “We should just consider basically that their debt to society has been paid and then to commute their sentences.”

Now, a commutation is not the same thing as a pardon. Let’s be clear. The President has the power to do both, to commute sentences and to pardon citizens. Those are two different things. A pardon means that the criminal conviction’s expunged from your record. A commutation means that your prison sentence is going to be ruled as having been served. Whatever prison sentence or whatever judicial sentence you have will be ruled to have been ended or commuted by presidential declaration. You may have served eight of 10 years, but the president commutes your sentence, you go home.

In the case of a large number of those in the 1,500 recently commuted, they were in some kind of home confinement because of COVID. And we’re also looking at the fact that the criminal justice system in the United States, the penal system of jails and prisons, it is vastly overtaxed. That is to say it’s overworked. The demand is greater than the supply. And so, in almost any major American city, you’re going to have a lot of people you’re going to pass on a sidewalk who were perhaps even then under some kind of judicial restraint, some kind of criminal definition.

But the really interesting thing here is that Joe Biden was basically bragging, the White House was bragging about having done something that was claimed to have been just, it was claimed that this was a just act to commute these sentences. What’s really interesting in this case is how many people, even of the president’s own party, came out and said this was wrong. And so, you have say, politicians in Wisconsin saying, “This means that people who are dangerous and are guilty of very serious crimes are being put onto the streets of Wisconsin.” State by state you had similar kinds of criticisms that were made. Then you had all kinds of examples, such as what was reported by CNN. Here’s the headline, “Victims shocked after Biden grants clemency to kids-for-cash judge.” And in another case of this kind of shock, he granted clemency to an embezzler of $54 million.

Now, here’s what’s interesting. We’re told, “A Biden administration official told CNN the latest commutations were not individual decisions, and instead it was a uniform decision granted to people who met certain criteria like having a track record of good behavior while on house arrest.” Now, honestly, every time a president of the United States exercises his constitutional authority in this way, there are consequences and there is controversy. And in this case, I think President Biden deserves a lot of criticism for having taken this act. For one thing, the White House is in no position to come back and say, “Oh, some people were put back on the streets who shouldn’t have been put back on the streets. We didn’t do this on an individual basis. We did this on a group basis.” Well, regardless of that, it was the president of the United States who commuted these sentences on his own personal authority. He bears full responsibility. It cannot be delegated to anyone else.

This is going to go down as a lasting memory of Joe Biden’s presidency. Along with, let’s remind ourselves, his categorical pardon of his own son, convicted of criminal charges. CNN reports about that first situation, that is the kids-for-cash judge, “Former Pennsylvania Judge Michael Conahan was convicted in 2011 in what was infamously called the kids-for-cash scandal, where he took kickbacks from for-profit detention centers in exchange for wrongly sending juveniles to their facilities. The case was widely considered to be one of the worst judicial scandals in Pennsylvania history.” Well, Scranton Joe, you bear responsibility for putting this criminal back on the streets. A lot of folks in Pennsylvania are not happy about having this criminal back on the streets. They’re also not happy about the fact that the state of Pennsylvania eventually had to pay $200 million to the victims of this judge’s criminal behavior.

I just want to make a major theological point here. Looking at a controversy like this, we see there are some big applications just to thinking about the constitutional power of the presidency and understanding of what is right and wrong, the demands of justice. Also, we look at the very real danger of putting some of these people back on the streets. You look at the fact that justice when corrupted or warped in this way, it serves to minimize the entire system of justice.

Part III

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Salvation is Not a Pardon or Commutation: At the Heart of the Gospel is the Substitutionary Atonement of Christ on Our Behalf

But there’s a deeper Christian reason for us to think about these things, far beyond the headlines in these news story or the scandal of this presidential action. We need to think about the very notion of clemency. We need to think about the notion of pardon. We need to think about what this means in light of the gospel of Jesus Christ. As we think about in this case, clemency, or in this case, the commutation of a sentence, the interesting thing is that President Biden did not dare to say that these criminals who were convicted of their crimes didn’t commit criminal offenses. He doesn’t say that. He simply says, “We’re going to accept that the debt they have paid to society is going to be paid in full ahead of the accomplishment of their sentences,” simply because he wants to say so.

And there’s a sense immediately of the injustice of that. They did not serve their sentences. They should have served their sentences. What does Joe Biden as president of the United States, what does he think he’s doing by simply commuting 1,500 sentences in this way? And then we think back to the previous controversy over President Biden’s pardon of his son, Hunter Biden. And you think of the word pardon. It’s not the same thing as a commutation. Commuting a sentence means that the verdict of guilty remains, but time served is simply going to be considered as just equity and punishment for the crime.

Pardon means the society is going to act as if the crime never happened, or at least as if there was no real criminal guilt when it comes to this person. If you are pardoned, then you walk away basically scot-free. But it’s really important to notice that when a president pardons someone, he doesn’t say to another citizen, “Okay, this means you’ve got to go serve this sentence, or you’ve got to go serve the remainder of this sentence.” It simply says, “We’re going to act as if this offense never happened. No one’s going to go to jail for this offense, or at least no one’s going to stay in jail for this offense.”

And you say, “What does this have to do with the gospel?” Well, it has everything to do with the gospel. In terms of our necessary understanding that what was happening in this case of either President Biden’s pardon of his own son or the commutation of these particular sentences, massive number, 1,500 sentences. We need to understand that neither of those acts comes close to what is described as pardon in a biblical understanding of the gospel of Jesus Christ. So, my point here is not primarily legal. It is not primarily political. It is primarily theological in order to see the glory of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

We deserve the verdict of guilty. Every single one of us, all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. We all deserve to spend eternity in hell because of our rebellion against God and our sin against him. This is all of us. And if we were sent to hell and separated from God and given the sentence of eternal punishment because of our sin, God would be just in doing so. He would be absolutely just in sending us into eternal punishment. But we are told, “God so loved the world that he gave his only son, that whosoever believes in him might not perish, but have everlasting life.”

And that points to the fact that as the New Testament tells us, it is not that our sentence is merely commuted. God does not say, “If you believe in my son as savior and you place your faith and trust in him, if you confess Jesus Christ is Lord, and believe that God has raised him from the dead, then I’m going to commute your sentence.” He doesn’t say, “We’re just going to consider this on the basis of time served.” He doesn’t say, “We’re going to ignore the crimes and we’re simply going to dismiss the punishment.” That is not the atonement. That is not the salvation accomplished for us through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Nor is it merely a pardon as if to say, “We were found guilty, we’re now just going to be declared not to be guilty. No one’s going to pay the penalty. It’s as if the crime didn’t happen. The folder is simply going to be closed and you are free to walk.” That is not the gospel.

The gospel does not tell us that God, the righteous judge, simply says, “I give everyone a blanket pardon.” No. Instead, the sentence for our sin, the just punishment for our sin, that was placed by the Father on the Son. And Jesus Christ on the cross willingly bore the just penalty for our sin, the sins of all the redeemed, such that there was no commutation of the sentence, and the sin was not merely pardoned, rather sinners receive pardon through the substitutionary atonement of the Lord Jesus Christ. “He made him,” Paul says, “who knew no sin to be sin for us, in order that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” And that’s because God the Father didn’t commute our sentence. He didn’t just issue a blanket pardon. No. He promises salvation to those who come to faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and repent of our sins precisely because as the hymn tells us, “Jesus paid it all. All to him, I owe. Sin had left its crimson stain. He washed it white as snow.” This is the substitutionary atonement.

Those who are in Christ are in Christ precisely because he did pay it all. He paid the penalty for our sin. He paid it in full for all the redeemed. That’s the grace and the glory of the atonement accomplished by the Lord Jesus Christ. And even in the New Testament, it is really interesting that the New Testament uses the legal terms and the legal process of that time in order to help us understand the gospel. Oddly enough, talking about these same issues in our time gives us the opportunity to do the same. Let’s seize it.