No. I'm pretty sure (given that nobody at all has claimed he did) that he didn't physically touch anybody. But I don't think it's reasonable to say that you can't take action until somebody else has been hurt.

Neely was shouting threats at passengers and his behaviour was steaduly escalating. Numerous eyewitnesses have reported this. And yeah, at some point, Penny, along with two other passengers I remind you, thought they needed to intervene.

This is a good example of what I'm talking about in the article. It's ever so easy for you to sit there in safety and criticise the behaviour of people who believed they were in danger. But not a single person on that train seemed to think Penny was wrong to take action. In fact, some of them thanked him for doing so.

What is undoubtedly wrong is the degree of force Penny used. And he's going to face trial for that as he should. If it wasn't already clear from the article where I explicitly say so, no, I don't support the "Ron DeSantis approach." Penny deserves a fair trial, and there's still a lot of detail that none of us know. But he also deserves to be held accountable for his actions. He chose to intervene, that intervention went badly wrong, and there should be consequences.

p.s. You writing "lynched" in capital letters doesn't' make it any less stupid or crass a comparison. Go look at some actual lynchings. Go look up the case of James Byrd Jr. You have no idea what you're talking about. It's idiotic and flat-out disrespectful to the innocent black people who were brutally murdered in this way to compare then to the accidental death of a violent, mentally ill man. Deal with it.