THE FATE OF SEVEN PROTESTERS facing about a decade in prison for stopping traffic on the Golden Gate Bridge in 2024 during a demonstration against what they said was U.S. support for Israel’s war crimes in Gaza now rests in the hands of a San Francisco jury.
Closing arguments concluded on Friday in San Francisco Superior Court in the case against activists who were protesting U.S. support for what has been described by humanitarian organizations around the world as a genocide perpetrated by Israel in Gaza.
Jurors did not deliver a verdict in their first days of deliberations on Friday and Monday.
About 73,000 people have been killed by Israel in Gaza since October 2023, and about 38,000 of those killed have been women, children and elderly, according to the World Health Organization. About 90% of the roughly 2.1 million Palestinians who call Gaza home have been displaced at some point since that time, according to the United Nations.
Five counts of misdemeanor false imprisonment were dropped by the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office ahead of closing arguments.
Now the number of false imprisonment charges each protester faces is four. They were originally charged with 38 counts of false imprisonment, which each carry up to a year in jail.
Originally, 26 protesters were charged for taking part in the demonstration that took place on April 15, 2024, but 19 either had charges dropped or took pretrial diversion offers for lesser charges. The seven who were not given those offers include six who chained themselves together in vehicles on the bridge and a protester who was designated to communicate with authorities that responded.
The six who were chained together face up to nine years in prison, while the protester who refers to herself as a police liaison — as protesters called her — faces 10 years behind bars for taking part in a campaign to get lawmakers’ attention and cause economic disruption by halting traffic in all three open southbound lanes on the bridge, according to their testimony.
Their goal, they testified, was to make lawmakers rethink the ongoing military support the U.S. was providing, and they believed the demonstration was protected by law because it was intended to save lives.
Criticism from defenders, advocacy groups
The case drew criticism because of the severity of charges that San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins chose to file, including felony conspiracy, trespassing to interfere with a business, and multiple false imprisonment charges, which are rare in cases of peaceful protest.
Jenkins and the California Highway Patrol also publicly solicited people stuck on the bridge — who they called “victims” of the protest — to come forward and seek restitution from the protesters, a move that was also criticized by the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office as unusual.
The decision to charge the protesters with such serious offenses was criticized by the Public Defender’s Office and the nonprofit legal aid organization Partnership for Civil Justice Fund. They echoed organizations like the Council on American-Islamic Relations and Jewish Voice for Peace Bay Area who said Jenkins was previously targeting protesters because of their message in support of Palestine.
“Protests on bridges are not uncommon, but the charges in this case are. This is the first time we have seen conspiracy charges in San Francisco based on a nonviolent protest, in at least 35 years,” Rachel Lederman, an attorney with the nonprofit Center for Protest Law & Litigation said in a statement when the charges were filed.
A similar effort in 2020 by the district attorney of San Luis Obispo County to prosecute Black Lives Matter protesters for false imprisonment for stopping traffic on U.S. Highway 101 ended up with the charges being reduced.
The San Francisco Public Defender’s Office also criticized the District Attorney’s Office for trying to prevent the word “genocide” from being said during the trial. San Francisco Superior Court Judge Teresa Caffese rejected the district attorney’s motion and allowed “genocide” to be said, and it was throughout the defense’s closing arguments.
Defense attorneys asked for the District Attorney’s Office to be recused from the case after presenting allegations Jenkins had characterized a previous protest calling for a ceasefire in Gaza as “pro-Hamas” in a social media post, and after an email from a subordinate who disparaged Muslims was made public.
A similar request in a case involving pro-Palestinian protesters who occupied a Stanford University administrative building was granted after the judge in that case agreed that Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen could not fairly try the protesters because of remarks he made in a fundraising email indicating bias.
Caffese denied the motion to disqualify Jenkins and her office. She allowed the word genocide to be used as it pertained to the protesters’ state of mind, and what they believed to be true, but repeatedly told the jury that was not being established as a legal fact.
When the 26 stopped traffic that day urging an end to military aid for the violence, several organizations had criticized Israel for committing crimes against humanity in Gaza but none of Israel’s leaders were formally wanted for accusations of international war crimes.
Now, two are wanted by the International Criminal Court and two others have publicly said that warrants were issued for them. One who is wanted for alleged war crimes, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, declared in late May that Israel would take over 70% of Gaza, in violation of international law.
Why protesters say it was necessary
The protesters testified that they were desperate to stop the violence and felt unstoppable guilt because of the United States’ provision of weapons and money to continue the unrelenting barbarity that was being conducted in their names.
They cited the resignation of a U.S. State Department official who oversaw weapons transfers, a federal judge in Oakland’s written opinion that the judiciary was powerless to stop the slaughter, and the closed doors and unreturned phone calls from elected lawmakers all as examples of how all three branches of government had failed to stop the killing.
They testified that the silence from those in power, in the face of clear violations of U.S. law, required them to take direct action to bring attention to the urgency of the situation.
The demonstration came ahead of an impending assault on Rafah, a city in the south of Gaza that the Israeli government had previously told displaced Palestinians to go to for safety, adding immediacy to the protesters’ need to halt U.S. support.
Defense attorneys’ closing arguments rejected the notion that the bridge — which they said is operated by a public agency and is open to the public at all times because it is U.S. Highway 101 — was a business, and focused on a legal concept known as the necessity doctrine, or defense, that asserts a person is immune from prosecution if they are acting in an emergency to prevent a loss of life, under certain circumstances.
In a legal and rhetorical sleight of hand, they reminded jurors that the concept doesn’t need to actually apply to the protest, but was relevant to the protesters’ state of mind, because they believed what they were doing was a lawful assembly.
That’s a key point, given that the felony conspiracy charge requires an agreement to commit a crime.
The protesters organized a meeting for the night before the protest in West Berkeley where plans were made to stop traffic on the bridge, several testified. But whether they thought they were agreeing to do something illegal, rather than, in their words, “urgent and lifesaving,” is now up to a jury of their peers.