Columbia University had a terrible response to the student protests over Gaza, unleashing the police in a heavy-handed crackdown and arresting many people. Now charges against almost all of them have been dropped.
Dozens of pro-Palestinian student protesters arrested in April after occupying and barricading a building at Columbia University in New York City have had all criminal charges against them dropped, Manhattan prosecutors said at a court hearing.
The hearing at the Manhattan criminal courthouse came seven weeks after Columbia administrators called in hundreds of armed and heavily armored police officers to the university’s campus in a high-profile law-enforcement response that was broadcast live on national news channels.
Police arrested 46 protesters who had barricaded themselves inside Hamilton Hall, and cleared a weeks-old tent encampment on a nearby Columbia lawn that has inspired similar pro-Palestinian protests at universities around the world.
All 46 protesters, who were arrested on the night of 30 April about 20 hours after taking over the academic building, were initially charged with trespass in the third degree, a misdemeanor.
Stephen Millan, a prosecutor in the Manhattan district attorney’s office, told the court on Thursday his office would not prosecute 30 protesters who were Columbia students at the time of the arrest, nor two who were Columbia employees, citing prosecutorial discretion and lack of evidence. A case against another student was dismissed earlier in the month.
Millan said protesters wore masks and covered surveillance cameras, and there was insufficient evidence to show that any individual defendant damaged property or injured anyone.
No police officers were injured during the arrests, the prosecutor noted.
Authorities are still trying to pressure another 13 but they are defiant.
Prosecutors declined to outright drop trespass charges against 13 other people arrested inside Hamilton Hall that night. Two of the 13 were also Columbia students, while the other 11 had no current affiliation with the school, although most were alumni.
The district attorney’s office proposed the 13 accept an adjournment in contemplation of dismissal, a provision in New York law that if accepted means the case against a defendant will be dropped and sealed in six months if they are not arrested for another offense in the interim.
All 13 rejected the offer through their lawyers, who are seeking to have those cases dismissed. The 13 are due to return to court on 25 July, by which date prosecutors must decide if they are willing to proceed to a trial over the trespass charges. Another arrested protester accepted the offer earlier in June.
I anticipate that those charges will also be dropped because it looks like the prosecutors realize that their case seems so weak.
The district attorney’s office proposed the 13 accept an adjournment in contemplation of dismissal, a provision in New York law that if accepted means the case against a defendant will be dropped and sealed in six months if they are not arrested for another offense in the interim.
Translation: “We’re kinda sorta dropping the charges, but we’re pretending not to, and we’ll be looking for any chance to shaft you lot again.” Or maybe “dropped with prejudice?”
If the protestor has a lawyer the charges usually get dropped. There are two reasons for this.
First, the prosecutor may decide the case can’t be won in court. One of the protestors committed a crime but there isn’t any hard evidence and the other protestors can’t/won’t turn witness. With no way to pin down which protestor did it the case can’t get beyond reasonable doubt.
Second, and more commonly, there was never any intent to prosecute. The arrests were made to break up the protest. People were grabbed and held, exaggerated claims made to the press, wait a few weeks for the immediate anger and reason for the protest to blow over, then quietly drop charges.
JM, your second point rings true.
Trespass seems easy to prove. Did the property owner (or representative of) want them to leave? And was chain of custody maintained? If yes to both, trespass. It is only the specific acts of damage, if such took place at all, that would be difficult to pin on a given individual.
So basically Columbia and the district attorney’s office have realized that a) martyrs for the cause are not good publicity and b) {purely supposition} sanctioning students at an elite Ivy League university just might annoy some very wealthy, very powerful, parents who were not amused when their son or daughter ended up in a NY police holding cell threatened with a possible criminal record.
McGill, in Montréal, tried something similar. Both the Police and the courts said, in essence, get lost. They were not going to walk into that morass especially after the 2012 Tuition Protests in Quebec..