Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, last week dropped most of the 46 cases against pro-Palestinian protesters charged in the April 30 siege of Hamilton Hall at Columbia University because prosecutors had little evidence the cases would stand trial. .
There was limited video footage of what happened inside the campus building, Doug Cohen, a spokesman for the district attorney, said in a statement. Protesters wore masks and covered security cameras, preventing prosecutors from identifying those who blocked doors and smashed chairs, desks and windows during the 17-hour occupation.
The district attorney announced the decision to drop 31 of the 46 cases during a court hearing Thursday. Besides trespassing, a misdemeanor, proving any other criminal charges would be “extremely difficult,” Mr. Cohen said.
For similar reasons, prosecutors also dismissed charges against nine of the 22 students and staff members at City College who were arrested inside a campus building and charged with burglary during a protest that took place the same night as the Hamilton arrests Hall.
Six other people arrested outside the building still face criminal charges: five were charged with second-degree assault, a felony, and another was charged with fourth-degree criminal possession of a weapon, a misdemeanor.
The April 30 protests grew out of a weeklong encampment on Columbia’s South Lawn that sparked similar protests on college campuses across the country and led to hundreds of arrests. As the academic year drew to a close, protesters called on Columbia to divest from Israel, among other demands, sometimes clashing with counter-protesters or the police.
The university’s decision to call in the Police Department to clean up Hamilton Hall was met with both outrage and praise. Mayor Eric Adams blamed the occupation on “outside agitators” who he said tried to “radicalize” otherwise peaceful students. Most of the 282 people arrested at Columbia and City College were university students or staff members. most were issued a summons and the rest were charged criminally, mostly for trespassing.
All of the protesters whose cases were dropped were connected to the schools, Mr. Cohen said. Both schools may still discipline those whose criminal cases were dismissed, and cases involving more serious charges, including assaults on police officers, are ongoing, Mr. Cohen said.
In New York, it is common for prosecutors to drop cases against protesters charged with low-level offenses during mass arrests. Under Cyrus Vance Jr., a former Manhattan district attorney, 680 cases against the 732 people arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge during the 2011 Occupy Wall Street protests were dropped. About 5,000 police summonses issued during Black Lives Matter marches across the city in 2020 were also dismissed under Mr. Vance.
Mr. Bragg, a Democrat who took office in 2022 and recently won a criminal case against former President Donald J. Trump, has focused his efforts on prosecuting more serious crimes. During his first week in office, he faced criticism when he instructed prosecutors to ask judges for jail or prison terms only for serious offenses such as murder, sexual assault and major financial crimes, unless the law required otherwise. (Review the policy next month.)
Martin R. Stolar, a Manhattan lawyer and former president of the New York chapter of the National Bar Association, who has been defending the protesters for 50 years, said Mr. Bragg’s decision last week was expected, calling it a “prudent use of prosecutorial resources.”
The protesters at Columbia and City College, mostly students, “weren’t throwing bombs, they weren’t shooting people, they weren’t robbing people, they weren’t dealing drugs,” Mr. Stolar said.
“When you assess that against the backdrop of what these arrests were, it doesn’t qualify as a serious crime,” he added, “you have to pick and choose.”
Local politicians who criticized the campus protesters and spoke publicly of their support for Israel acknowledged the difficulty of proving the charges in the dismissed cases. In a radio interview Friday, Mayor Adams, a Democrat, said he respected the prosecutor’s decision. Representative Jerrold Nadler, also a Democrat and the longest-serving Jewish member of the House of Representatives, said he had “total faith in DA Bragg.”
“The reality is that many of the cases related to the protests at Columbia University are difficult to prosecute due to a lack of evidence, and the vast majority involved first-time offenders,” Mr. Nadler said in a statement. “I defer to his judgment on this matter.”
But dozens of student protesters who appeared in court on Thursday were not satisfied with Mr Bragg’s decision, calling on him to dismiss all cases. Some other students who had been charged, speaking at a news conference after the hearing, said they had received offers from prosecutors to dismiss their cases if they were not rearrested within six months. Most had rejected those deals, they said, arguing that the cases should have been dismissed outright.
Julian Roberts-Grumela contributed to the report.
