In a situation reminiscent of the Bernie Goetz case, the brave Samaritan who stopped potential murders on a New York subway is being prosecuted for his courage. Such is the legal sewer that is New York City.

Daniel Penny, a Marine veteran, was indicted Wednesday by a Gotham grand jury who seemingly want innocent people to die at the hands of deranged lunatics. Penny was indicted on one count each of criminally negligent homicide and second-degree manslaughter for the incident on May 21st. They call him a criminal. That’s not the way he sees it, or for that matter, not the way any reasonable person would see it.

“Between stops, you’re trapped on the train, and there’s nowhere to go. You can try to move away, but you can only do so much on a packed car,” Penny, 24, said in a Fox interview. “I was scared. I looked around, and I saw older women and children, and they were terrified. He ripped off his jacket and threw it down at the people sitting next to me,” Penny remembered.

“I was listening to music at the time, and I took my headphones out to hear what he was yelling,” he continued. “The three main threats that he repeated over and over again were, ‘I’m going to kill you,’ ‘I’m prepared to go to jail for life,’ and, ‘I’m willing to die.’” Yup, Neely was just your average New Yorker sharing his thoughts and feelings with the world at large.

“Some people say I was trying to choke him to death, which is also not true. I was trying to restrain him,” Penny recalled. “You can see in the video there’s a clear rise and fall of his chest, indicating that he’s breathing. I’m trying to restrain him from being able to carry out the threats.”

I didn’t see a black man threatening passengers, I saw a man threatening passengers, a lot of whom were people of color,” Penny said. “The man who helped restrain Mr. Neely was a person of color. A few days after the incident I read in the papers that a woman of color came out and called me a hero.” As indeed you are, Marine. But not to many people in Pyongyang-on-the-Hudson and especially not to the local district attorney. They would have preferred you allowed Neely to go through with his threats.

Penny’s attorney Thomas Kenniff isn’t thrilled with the legal acumen of Neely family attorney Donte Mills, “You know, I don’t know that gentleman. I don’t know how much criminal law that attorney practices. But he’s frankly just very, very wrong on the law,” he said. “The standard in New York State is [that] you don’t have to wait until someone physically attacks. You don’t have to wait until someone is lying on the ground or worse. The standard is whether a reasonable person in my client’s position would have feared imminent harm and the reality is, that it wasn’t just my client who expresses how terrified he was by Jordan Neely’s actions on the subway train that afternoon.” Just so.