The Founding Fathers and their generation placed great store in the jury in both criminal and civil cases.

A Manhattan jury yesterday quite properly acquitted Daniel Penny of negligence after the judge dismissed the reckless homicide charge, upon which the jury had deadlocked. Strictly speaking, this may look illogical: Anyone willing to convict Penny of the greater charge of recklessness should, logically, have already concluded that he was guilty of the lesser included offense of negligent homicide. Juries often do not act with strict logic, and this can drive lawyers — who are trained to think in logical syllogism — up a wall. It is entirely possible that the jury took the cue from the judge’s dismissal of the recklessness charge to conclude that the prosecution’s case was collapsing and should be put out of its misery.

But logical or not, juries tend to get things right pretty reliably — at least when they are asked to do the basic job that juries exist to do. The Penny jury, like the juries in the cases of Kyle Rittenhouse, Derek Chauvin, George Zimmerman, or the killers of Ahmaud Arbery (or the grand jury in the Eric Garner case), was asked to assess gut-level questions of violent confrontations in the streets and on the subways. Whether those are framed as issues of self-defense, excessive force, or vigilantism, they come down to the same essential line-drawing issue. That issue is within the ordinary understanding of the ordinary citizen, and it invokes principles of law and justice that are of very long vintage. We get juries of various mixes of gender, race, education, and life experience, and we ask them to pool their sentiments. They usually get it right, both in acquittals and convictions.

I don’t know how fully informed the Penny jury was on Alvin Bragg’s absurd double standards for enforcement of the law. But these are New Yorkers. They know what their city looks like today. They know how crazy people on the subway can swiftly escalate from annoyance to terror. They know that sometimes, the only law on hand is the courage of civilians such as Daniel Penny. Their verdict, whether explicitly or implicitly, reflects that experience.

Where juries go off the rails, as they did in convicting Donald Trump in the false-documents case, it is often not their fault. While it might have been better if the Trump jury had seen through the shame of that prosecution, they were misled by the law, denied key evidence, and then asked to do things outside their competence in assessing a complex Rube Goldberg contraption of a statute that was totally un-intuitive. That’s not on the jurors.

The Founding Fathers and their generation placed great store in the jury in both criminal and civil cases, seeing a panel of ordinary citizens as the last line of defense against a tyrannical and overweening government. We should be glad that they secured us that safeguard.