Democrats cast him and Jordan Neely as one-dimensional caricatures in a grand political drama.

The charges that Manhattan  District Attorney Alvin Bragg brought against Daniel Penny for the alleged murder of subway vagrant Jordan Neely fell apart in slow motion. On Friday, prosecutors tossed a manslaughter charge against Neely after jurors failed to reach a unanimous verdict. But the jury did manage to reach a consensus on Monday on the outstanding charge of negligent homicide: not guilty.

The verdict represents a repudiation of those who argued that Penny was in no way justified when he attempted to subdue an erratic and menacing homeless man amid an outbreak of violent criminality in New York City’s subway system. The defense prevailed in convincing the jury that there was sufficient evidence to blame Penny alone for Neely’s death, but that wasn’t the only argument jurors were asked to adjudicate.

“Who do you want on the next train ride with you?” Penny’s lawyers argued. “The guy with the earbuds minding his own business who you know would be there for you if something happened? Or perhaps you just hope that someone like Jordan Neely does not enter that train when you are all alone, all alone in a crowd of others frozen with fear?”

This is compelling logic. So compelling, in fact, that Penny’s defamers deployed all the emotional blackmail in their arsenals to convince New Yorkers that Neely was a wholly sympathetic victim.

The New York Daily News held a vigil for Neely — a beloved local street performer with complicating neurological disorders. His autism “prevented Neely from finding steady work” and led him to forgo his medication. CNN remembered Neely as “an entertainer” and “a kind and sweet soul.” He was a “talented dancer” who had a “fan club,” The Guardian recounted. Those who defended Neely and the subway riders who assisted him were guilty of “spinning an act of vigilantism to blame the person killed by it,” The Independent’s Alex Woodward declared.

And that’s just the press. Elected officials in New York went further in the effort to cast Penny as the true threat to civic order.

“To say anything else is an equivocation that will only further a narrative that devalues the life of a Black, homeless man with mental health challenges and encourages an attitude of dehumanization of New Yorkers in greatest need,” New York City’s public advocate, Jumaane Williams, said of the Marine Corps veteran.

“Jordan Neely was murdered,” said Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, recklessly dispensing with the presumption of innocence. In a cascade of Marxian gibberish, AOC mourned the “public execution” of a man whose only crime was to be “houseless and crying for food in a time when the city is raising rents and stripping services to militarize itself while many in power demonize the poor.”

Prior to his ouster from office by his own Democratic constituents, Congressman Jamaal Bowman agreed with his progressive colleague. Neely was just “another black man publicly executed,” he said. State senator Jabari Brisport apparently thought Bowman was not being hysterical enough. “Jordan Neely was lynched,” he wrote. “He had the audacity to publicly yell about that massive injustice, so they killed him.” New York governor Kathy Hochul concurred with her party’s most injudicious actors. Neely was “known by many of the regular travelers,” the governor said. Video of the confrontation convinced her that Neely was “not going to, you know, cause harm to others” and there was no need for half his train car to hold “him down until the last breath was snuffed out of him.”

All of it amounted to an effort to try Daniel Penny in the court of public opinion. Democrats filtered this event through a highly abstract philosophical framework that rendered Neely and Penny one-dimensional caricatures in a grand political drama. That abstraction was unrecognizable to New York City’s subway riders. It certainly didn’t connect with the jury.

In lieu of “social justice,” a New York City courtroom dispensed actual justice on Monday. Surely, city residents will take a measure of solace in this triumph of common sense, even if their elected officials have theorized themselves out of experiencing any solidarity with the city they claim to represent.