This week the office of Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel dropped charges against three people arrested in relation to a pro-Palestinian protest during “Festifall,” an annual University of Michigan event for incoming freshmen.
An Ann Arbor District Court judge accepted a motion by the attorney general to dismiss charges on Tuesday. The latest dismissal means all 11 people charged by Nessel in relation to pro-Palestinian protests at U of M last year have now been cleared of charges. Earlier this month her office dismissed charges against seven protesters charged because of their actions during a police raid on their tent encampment.
Josiah Walker was charged with trespassing, while two others were charged with misdemeanors for trespassing and felonies for resisting arrest for staging a so-called “die-in” during the event.
Walker, who is a current undergraduate student at U of M, said he hopes the dismissed charges “serve as a message” to deter police action against what he called “anti-genocide protesters.” Walker and others in a coalition of student groups railed against the extended military action by Israel in Gaza in response to a Hamas-led attack in October 2023, and called on university leadership to divest from Israeli companies and those that do business with it. U of M has repeatedly declined, saying it has a policy to “shield the endowment from political pressures.”
Defense attorney Amir Makled said the dismissals are a victory not only for his client, Sammie Lewis. “It's important for others because it's showing that this is a dangerous trend in our state where we're criminalizing dissent and these cases are being dismissed because they don't hold any merit.”
Attorney General Nessel disputed that the dismissals have to do with the merits of the charges, and said she believed that a reasonable jury would find the defendants guilty based on the evidence. On Thursday her office said the reason for moving to dismiss the most recent cases was “consistent” with seven others in which she dropped charges earlier this month.
“When my office made the decision to issue charges of Trespassing and Resisting and Obstructing a Police Officer in this matter,” she said in a statement regarding the encampment cases, “we did so based on the evidence and facts of the case. I stand by those charges and that determination.”
But, she wrote then, she no longer found it worthwhile to pursue those charges because of what she called a “circus-like atmosphere” around the legal proceedings, as well as ongoing delays and efforts to have her removed from the case.
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