On Monday, a Manhattan jury acquitted U.S. Marine Corps veteran Daniel Penny of negligent homicide in the May 2023 death of Jordan Neely. This was a homeless drug addict with 42 prior arrests, including several for violent assault. Last week, the court dismissed a more serious manslaughter charge against Penny.

Neely, according to numerous witnesses, was actively menacing passengers on a downtown New York City subway when Penny placed him in a chokehold to restrain him, thus protecting himself and others from the kind of violence that has beset New York and other cities governed by Democrats.

The verdict, which came over 17 months after the incident, is a major vindication for law-and-order policies. These are the policies  opposed by many Democratic prosecutors who are aligned with the “restorative justice” movement and who are financed  by the radical leftist billionaire George Soros. Penny’s jury was drawn from a local population that votes over 80 percent Democratic in almost all recent elections, including the election of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, whose prosecutor on the case referred to Penny during the trial as “the white man.” In 2023, Bragg downgraded some 60 percent of felony crimes in his district to misdemeanors, but inflated misdemeanor charges against the once and future president Donald J. Trump to felonies based on a dubious legal theory. That case, which cost Manhattan taxpayers millions of dollars, now appears to be moribund despite Trump’s conviction in May.

Public rejection of soft crime policies is widespread. Since June 2022, 21 Soros-supported leftist prosecutors have been driven from office, mostly by solid Democratic constituencies who have had enough of them and their policies . These officials have been replaced by with prosecutors who are tougher on crime. This should be celebrated. Nevertheless, trouble remains.

Daniel Penny is free. He was stoic during his trial and benefited from a national fundraising campaign that covered his legal fees so that he did not have to rely on a New York public defender whose politics may have rendered him less than sympathetic to Penny’s plight. But he still had to spend nearly a year and a half of his life going through it. That would be hard for anyone, but it is an immense burden on a man in his mid-20s who, after honorable military service, would otherwise have been building a career, moving toward starting a family, and enjoying all the pleasures of life as a young adult.

Instead, the left and the weaponized government institutions under its control used Penny’s race, gender, and courage to try to make him a national pariah and a living symbol of its twisted ideas of “white privilege” and “systemic racism.” He had to entertain daily the possibility that he could spend up to 20 years in prison for protecting himself and others, and then live out the remainder of his life as an ex-con whose alleged crimes were rooted in purported racism. He had to live in the knowledge that the elected judicial authorities of our country’s largest and supposedly greatest city—with the unreserved support of many civic leaders, criminal justice theorists, and major leaders of one of our country’s two major political parties—did everything in their power to impose just that outcome on him. He likely realized that if they succeeded—and even if they failed, as they did—they would be emboldened to  punish others with the same process.

Indeed, Penny’s exoneration was never guaranteed. The dismissal of the more serious manslaughter charge only happened after the jury deadlocked after considerable deliberations and the prosecution gave up in the hope that it could still secure his conviction on the negligent homicide charge. Until the verdict was finally read out in court, there was no certainty that it would favor him. And even when it did, a co-founder of New York’s Black Lives Matter movement immediately screamed out an implicit threat directly at Penny:  “It’s a small f**king world, buddy!” —suggesting that Penny may not be safe outside the courtroom. If there was any doubt, the same activist leader later declared, “We need some black vigilantes … People want to jump up and choke us and kill us for being loud, how about we do the same when they attempt to oppress us?”

The NAACP denounced Penny’s freedom, claiming that to exonerate him was tantamount to “embracing vigilantism and disregarding the sanctity of human life.” The print edition of The New York Times, once the paper of record and still inexplicably a lodestone of American journalism, reported the verdict under the headline “Jury acquits man who was choking rider on subway,” hardly a fair or unbiased formulations of words.

Even if woke prosecutions have been stopped short, it is hard to imagine anyone confronted with potentially racialized violence not having these appalling details in mind when deciding whether they should stand up for what is right and good. Valorizing those who do stand up should be a point of pride and a national priority, but in the end it may not be enough.