The San Francisco District Attorney’s Office rested its case Thursday in the prosecution of seven protesters who were arrested for blocking traffic on the Golden Gate Bridge in 2024 during a demonstration against the United States’ support for what they called Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
The seven were part of a group of 26 people who were accused of blocking all three open southbound lanes on the bridge — which is U.S. Highway 101 — causing a traffic jam lasting over four hours.
The group was using Tax Day on April 15 that year to protest continued U.S. financial support for Israel’s military at a time when Israel had been accused of killing as many as 23,500 women and children in Gaza, a number that grew to about 51,000 by the time the trial began. The U.S. has contributed between $16 billion and $21 billion to Israel since 2023, according to studies from Brown University and the Quincy Institute.
The prosecution, led by Assistant District Attorney Angela Roze, hit some stumbling blocks in its attempt to show planning by the defendants, who are charged with felony conspiracy and several misdemeanors, including false imprisonment.
The charges, which carry a maximum of 15 years in prison, have been criticized as excessive and overly harsh by the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office, which is representing two of the defendants.
Prosecutors sat at a table facing the judge while all seven defendants sat with their lawyers at tables facing the jury in a crowded well. The jury and its alternates were made up of seven women and 10 men of various ages, genders and races. One woman uses a wheelchair.
Between 10-20 supporters of the protesters sat in the audience at any given time, including some of the 19 other protesters arrested that day who faced lesser charges and agreed to pretrial diversion programs. Many of the audience supporters and many of the defendants wore keffiyehs, traditional Palestinian headscarves.
Testimony was heard over five days from California Highway Patrol officers, Golden Gate Bridge personnel, and people stuck on the bridge that day who sought restitution after public appeals were made by CHP and the DA’s Office for victims of the protest to contact them.
A CHP digital crimes investigator who took phones from several protesters that day testified he found no evidence of communication between them, which could make felony conspiracy charges harder to prove.
The officer, Wilson Hom, said he used the software program Cellebrite and another called Magnet Graykey to extract data from multiple phones, including one that was fully downloaded.
When Roze asked if he found evidence of planning the protest, the defense objected, arguing that it was up to the jury to put context to whatever communication he might have found.
Judge Teresa Caffese seemed to agree, but then Roze asked again, and as the defense began objecting again, Hom answered simply, “no,” and said he had not found any communication between them at all.
Defense challenges traffic response
Whether or not an extra lane could have been opened by moving a changeable median on the bridge was a major point of contention between the two sides.
Defense attorneys argued that many of the risks to people stuck in traffic could have been mitigated — including the traffic itself — if the median had been moved to open a fourth lane on the southbound side. They said a protester designated to communicate with the CHP specifically asked for that to happen to allow emergency vehicles to access anyone who needed one.
Northbound traffic was also stopped by the CHP as a multitude of emergency vehicles responded to the bridge, which defense attorneys pointed out would have created the same type of risks the prosecution said people were experiencing because of the protesters.
According to the DA’s Office and those who testified, those risks included not having access to a bathroom, food or water, and missing work or appointments that could have direct or chain reaction consequences, such as two nurses who could not get to work when they were stuck in the southbound lanes.
Portable toilets were brought up to the bridge at some point and some people stuck in traffic got out of their vehicles to use them, according to one of the nurses who testified.
CHP Capt. Tyler Carlton testified that he never really considered opening up the extra lane, which uses a truck that moves down the divider to switch its segments over, referred to as a zipper car or zipper truck. But he also said he was not trained in how it worked.
“That tactic was not something I gave serious consideration to,” Carlton said.
He said he felt it would be dangerous because many of the people stuck in traffic had exited their cars and were standing on the roadway. He also said the number of emergency vehicles in the northbound lanes at that point would make it unsafe to open the extra southbound lane.
He also said it would take too long, but a bridge official testified that it takes about 20 to 30 minutes.
Instead, Carlton called a special response team from Sacramento to cut the chains that were connecting the protesters in the cars that had stopped.
Some of the witnesses called by the prosecution would later express frustration at the decisions by law enforcement that day, including one who said he only reported his experience to the CHP afterward because he wanted to complain about the apparent inertia from law enforcement.
He ended up being subpoenaed to testify for the prosecution, something he said he was conflicted about because he agreed with the protesters’ message.
The defense will present its case starting on Friday. The trial will then resume on Tuesday and the defense will likely be concluded by the end of the week, according to the two sides. A scheduled break in June for jury vacations and a hiatus from the judge could extend deliberations for several weeks into late June, depending on when the defense rests.