Charges dismissed against 27 arrested student protesters, 13 to continue legal battle
Pro-Palestinian students charged with criminal trespassing for last spring’s encampment appeared in court this morning, most agreeing to pay $90 fines for a simple trespassing infraction in exchange for their misdemeanor charges being dropped.
Ariela Lopez, Contributing Photographer
27 students charged with criminal trespassing for not vacating the pro-divestment encampment in April will pay $90 fines after a judge agreed this morning to lower their charges to simple trespass infractions, while one international student was given 40 hours of community service. Another 13 will return to court on Dec. 4 to continue to fight misdemeanor charges.
41 total Yale students were scheduled to appear in the New Haven Superior Court on Thursday morning six months after their arrests during the pro-Palestinian encampment on Yale’s campus at the end of the spring semester.
“For various functional reasons, some people wanted to be done with it,” said Greta LaFleur, a professor in Yale’s American Studies department who is representing many of the students. “But I still have some skin in the game,” she continued about the students who will appear again before the court.
LaFleur and Abigail Mason of Koch, Garg and Brown represent most of the arrested students. LaFleur said that she and Mason have filed six motions for the release of police body camera footage from the arrests, which they still have not received. Delays acquiring the footage led some of the students to choose to continue to fight misdemeanor charges instead of dismissing their cases, LaFleur said.
Mason, meanwhile, said that her clients for whom she requested continuances — three of the 13 students total who will appear on Dec. 4 — could not make the court date today.
In Lafleur’s group, “there is a group of students that is not going to take the infraction at this time,” Mason said. “For my group, they just couldn’t make it today.”
Week of arrests spawns months of disciplinary unfolding
The Yale Police Department arrested 44 students and 4 non-Yale affiliates on April 22, as they cleared the first protest encampment on Beinecke Plaza. All of the protesters were charged with criminal trespassing in the first degree, a class A misdemeanor that carries a maximum penalty of up to one year in jail, probation and a $2,000 fine.
During a nighttime rally on April 28, after a second encampment on Cross Campus was cleared without any arrests, the YPD arrested two Yale students and two non-Yale affiliates. All were charged with criminal trespassing in the first degree and disorderly conduct. One of the two students had been previously arrested on April 22.
On Monday, April 29, one additional student was arrested and charged with criminal mischief in the first degree for cutting a cord to take down the American flag that flies on Beinecke Plaza during a rally at the encampment.
Arrested students could appear in court remotely in July or in person in August, once they returned for the fall semester. On Aug. 28, Yale College’s first day of classes and the scheduled in-person court date, the students’ attorneys filed a motion to dismiss the charges against 41 students arrested on April 22.
The judge set a later court date for Oct. 31; the prosecutor filed an opposition motion against dismissing the case on Oct. 16.
LaFleur said to a huddle of students before Thursday’s hearing that the judge had just told her he would only hear the motion to dismiss if the cases went to trial.
Lawyers question police arrest warning in motion to dismiss charges
After a week urging the University to divest from weapons manufacturers, student organizers from the Sumud Coalition — then called “Occupy Beinecke” — set up a protest encampment on the night of Friday, April 19, outside the Schwarzmann Center on Beinecke Plaza.
During the encampment, protest organizers communicated with the Yale administration, frequently through intermediaries like heads of residential colleges, about student demands and potential disciplinary consequences for the ongoing action. Yale Police officers were present in increased numbers on Beinecke Plaza but made no arrests on Friday, Saturday and Sunday.
Early in the morning on Monday, April 22, police officers moved to clear the plaza of the roughly 30 tents and myriad tables and pieces of furniture that made up the encampment. Police reports, cited by both motions filed for the protesters’ cases, note that YPD Chief Anthony Campbell announced over a bullhorn that students would be “given a few minutes” to vacate the Plaza through High Street or Wall Street.
“No one will stop you from leaving,” Campbell is quoted as saying in the police report. “If you do not leave, you will be arrested. We will give you time to leave, if you do not leave, you will be arrested.”
In the motion submitted on Aug. 28, LaFleur and Mason wrote that a “vast majority” of students at the encampment were asleep in their tents at the time of Campbell’s announcement. Because of the acoustics of the Plaza, “some students did not hear the warning” at 6:38 a.m., the lawyers claim. They quote three students who claim that they were arrested within minutes of the warning being made, in contrast to Campbell’s directive that the students would be given time to vacate.
Prosecutor David Strollo filed opposition to the motion to dismiss the charges, in which he confirmed that the State has to prove that all the arrestees were present at the time of Campbell’s warning, as claimed by LaFleur and Mason. However, Strollo wrote that the students’ lawyers are wrong to claim that the prosecution must show that all the arrested students heard the warning.
Requiring the State to prove the arrestees heard the warning “would lead to absurd results,” Strollo wrote in his opposition to the motion. “Trespassers savvy enough to wear earplugs or headphones would be immune to convictions.”
LaFleur and Mason’s motion points out that the court summons sent to arrested students report timestamps certain arrests as being significantly later than the warning — between 8 a.m. and 8:30 a.m. The police report, LaFleur and Mason noted, claims that 48 students had been arrested and loaded onto buses for transport to the New Haven Police Department by 7:15 a.m., a time inconsistent with those on the summons.
The lawyers also argued that some students began to arrive at the plaza after the police had already begun to clear the encampment, attempting to retrieve belongings they had left behind on a previous day. These students possibly did not hear the 6:38 a.m. warning, the lawyers argued.
In the opposition motion, the prosecutor disputed that students who had not been in the encampment while Campbell delivered the warning were arrested. Strollo pointed to the police report, which notes that officers surrounded Beinecke Plaza to “restrict access of additional protesters coming into the plaza,” making it unlikely that students who were not present for the warning were arrested.
The prosecutor’s motion does not discuss the inconsistencies in the times of arrest recorded in the police report and the summons.
Rolling resolutions
46 Yale students were arrested in relation to the spring protests across the three days. Since May, several of the cases have been resolved.
Craig Birckhead-Morton ’24, who graduated from Yale College in the spring, was arrested twice — on April 22 and on May 1 — and charged with two counts of criminal trespassing and one count of disorderly conduct.
On Sept. 19, Birckhead-Morton made his final appearance in the New Haven Superior courthouse. The judge agreed to dismiss one of his criminal trespassing charges — the one from April 22 — and Birckhead-Morton instead paid a $90 fine for a simple trespassing infraction incurred that day. The judge also agreed to accept the prosecutor’s decision to not pursue the other criminal trespassing charge and the disorderly conduct charge from May 1.
The second student arrested on May 1 appeared in court remotely today.
Two of the students arrested during the encampment clearing on April 22 have not had cases pending since the summer, according to the Connecticut judicial website. The New Haven Independent reported in September that “several” arrested Yale protesters agreed, like Birckhead-Morton, to “pay fines to have their cases dropped.”
The court records for students whose misdemeanor charges have been reduced to infractions are not available to the public.
The student arrested on April 29 for taking down the American flag was charged with criminal mischief in the first degree, a Class D felony punishable by up to five years in prison. That student’s case was closed as of Sept. 11, according to court records. The student’s file is sealed.
Community responses to ongoing litigation
Since the April arrests, the Sumud Coalition has partly centered its advocacy around calling for Yale and University President Maurie McInnis to drop the legal charges against arrested students. Activists have coordinated letter-sending and phone-calling campaigns to university administrators, as well as rallies on the courthouse steps, including one before Thursday’s hearing.
The Yale College Council released a resolution stating the council’s “opposition to the disproportionate charges brought against the students” and community members arrested during the protests. The resolution called on the Yale administration to “formally request that the prosecutor dismiss these charges.”
Yale does not have the power to drop the charges since it is the State of Connecticut that is pressing them, although the University could ask the prosecutors to do so.
“It really isn’t in our hands. I know people imagine it might be, but it’s not,” McInnis told the News on Oct. 3. “The charges are in the hands of the prosecutor. Yale is not getting involved.”
The students also face academic discipline through Yale’s Executive Committee, to which students are automatically referred if they are arrested. In April, senior associate dean of strategic initiatives and communications Paul McKinley told the News that the committee typically does not begin disciplinary procedures for students until after any court hearings are completed because they do not want university decisions to influence legal outcomes.
But Dean of Yale College Pericles Lewis said on Wednesday that students were offered the option to have disciplinary hearings as early as April.
“And if people have asked for it to be delayed, we’ve been willing to delay it,” he added.
Approximately 70 people, including arrested students and fellow activists, rallied on the courthouse steps before this morning’s 10 a.m. appearance in the New Haven Superior Court.
The courthouse is located at 121 Elm St.
Karla Cortes contributed reporting.
Interested in getting more news about New Haven? Join our newsletter!