Chloe Edwards, Photography Editor

Around 250 pro-Palestine protesters rallied outside the New Haven Superior Court on Wednesday morning to show support for 14 protesters charged with criminal trespassing during the first divestment encampment in April appearing for a pretrial court hearing.

The 14 Yale affiliates summoned to court on Wednesday are among over 50 people — including 46 Yale students — who were arrested on three occasions throughout late April and early May in relation to campus protests demanding that Yale divest from companies that profit from the war in Gaza. Besides the students who appeared before court on Wednesday, several students appeared in court virtually over the summer on July 8 and 9. Others will appear in person on Thursday, Aug. 29. 

“We refuse to operate under any illusion that the American legal system upholds justice,” the arrestees wrote in a statement published shortly after the rally commenced. “Our oppressors will never grant us liberation through sanctioned channels for dissent. We will continue to resist genocide and colonial power by any means necessary.” 

Wednesday’s rally, which was organized by a cross-coalition group known as the Drop the Charges Campaign, was attended by individual protesters as well as contingents from Jewish Voice for Peace New Haven and Faculty for Justice in Palestine-Yale. 

The crowd, which was composed of mostly Yale students and affiliates, dissented against the arrests and charges while reaffirming their focus on the war in Gaza through chants such as “free, free Palestine” and “Yale, Yale, you can’t hide, you’re financing genocide.”

“It’s completely unacceptable for a university that purports to believe in free speech and has an open public square, that sends us email after email to that effect extolling its own record on free speech, to then use police to crack down on students peacefully protesting,” Elijah Bacal ’27, a member of Yale Jews for Ceasefire, told the News at the rally. “It just seems to me nonsensical, hypocritical.” 

Around 50 protesters made their way into the courthouse to spectate the proceeding, which began just after 10:15 a.m. Some remained in the lobby due to a lack of seating. 

The 14 arrested protesters gathered with their attorneys for a debrief after the court session. Most of the protesters disbanded from the courthouse by 11:00 a.m.

“We’re here in solidarity with those who have to go before a judge today and with Palestine, which continues to endure the genocide sponsored by our university,” Tacey Hutten ’26, a Yale student and protestor who was arrested last spring, told the News. “While we may have had a break from school, there was no break in Israel’s genocide and occupation in Gaza. We are morally obligated to continue to struggle and continue to fight against colonial genocide.”

The April protests focused on Yale’s endowment, which indirectly invests roughly $110,000 of Yale’s $113 million in publicly disclosed assets in companies that manufacture weapons — such as Lockheed Martin — via ETFs, a collection of stocks or bonds bought as a single unit. The total size of Yale’s endowment is $40.7 billion, but only about 0.3 percent of those holdings are publicly available through SEC filings.

All of the protesters summoned on Wednesday are represented either by Yale faculty member Greta LaFleur or by Abigail Mason, a lawyer at the Connecticut-based law firm Koch, Garg & Brown. The two attorneys filed a motion on Wednesday morning to dismiss the criminal trespass charges against the 44 Yale affiliates arrested on April 22. At the hearing, the judge determined that the charged protesters will next appear in court on Oct. 31 to allow the judge time to read through the motion — which Mason described as “lengthy” — as well as the expected response from the prosecutor.

Mason explained that although the final decision on whether to drop charges would be up to the prosecutor, Yale could put pressure on the prosecutor not to pursue the case further.

Dean of Yale College Pericles Lewis confirmed that the University would not necessarily be responsible for dropping charges. 

“The university doesn’t decide about charges on the part of the state prosecutor,” Lewis told the News. “What we have control of is the disciplinary process.”

Lewis told the News that he believes any academic discipline would be enforced by the Executive Committee against the arrested students only after the judge rules on the protesters’ cases.

Wednesday’s rally also comes amid an ongoing letter campaign in which supporters of the arrested protesters sent letters to the Yale administration demanding that charges against the protesters be dropped. As of Wednesday, nearly 15 thousand letters have been sent. 

Concurrent with the hearing, the Drop the Charges campaign announced a “phone zap” session via Instagram in which they called Yale administrators, including Lewis, University President Maurie McInnis and Dean of Students Melanie Boyd, to demand that the charges be dropped and to reiterate their ongoing demands that Yale disclose its investments and divest from military weapons manufacturing. 

The New Haven Superior Court is located at 121 Elm Street.

Correction 9/12: Yale police arrested 46 students in total from April to May 2024, not 47, as the article originally stated. One student was arrested twice.