The jury weighing the fate of Daniel Penny had every reason to convict the innocent Marine veteran for a crime he did not commit. Despite the fact that Alvin Bragg downgraded a staggering 60% of felony cases to lesser charges in the last year, the Manhattan district attorney went after Penny with a perverse passion, charging Penny with second-degree manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide for the drug-fueled death of a mentally ill career criminal, Jordan Neely.

Judge Maxwell Wiley attempted to strong-arm the jury into a conviction, dismissing the manslaughter charge to force the deadlocked jury to proceed to a conviction on the homicide count, a charge the jury was never supposed to even consider without a guilty verdict for the manslaughter charge. And as Penny’s defense protested, the vitriolic threats of the mob outside the courtroom — “if we don’t get no justice, they don’t get no peace” — could be heard inside.

Yet justice prevailed. In the face of a baseless prosecution, a judge attempting to rig the rules of the law, and external violent threats by a mob encouraged by the state’s venom toward Penny, the jury delivered the only justified verdict in a unanimous finding of Penny’s innocence.

Much, much more than a 15-year prison sentence to be suffered by an innocent man was at stake. The principles of “communitas” and “communis” that make cities, with all of their shared public parks and subways, were on trial: Can a good man stand up and preserve the safety of the common spaces “shared by all or many”? In the face of violence or evil (in this case, a deranged lunatic screaming death threats in a subway car packed with women and children), is a good man allowed to prove himself a great one? Let alone a decent and chivalrous one and do what must be done to protect the innocent?

Justice itself was also on trial. While Bragg charged Penny $100,000 in bail for his freedom during the trial, 87% of his prosecuted peers were released after their arrests without bail, two-thirds of whom were arrested again within the next two years. While Bragg diverted more than a year of time and resources to prosecute Penny for subduing a criminal screaming death threats on the subway, homicides on the subway skyrocketed a staggering 60%, with gun arrests up 83% and grand larceny arrests up 24%.

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In the face of all this violence and serial crime exploding amid the DA’s ambivalence, could the jury possibly justify condemning an upright citizen for doing what the police should have done long ago?

Evidently, the jury, like the rest of Manhattan, has had enough of a politicized prosecution that enables career criminals and antisocial behavior. Daniel Penny’s innocence is a victory for every New Yorker wishing to reclaim the safety of our nation’s greatest public transit system and the community’s control of perhaps the greatest city in the world.