Seven people who blocked the Golden Gate Bridge for four hours during a pro-Palestine protest in April 2024 were each found guilty of a string of misdemeanors on Thursday, but the jury failed to reach a verdict for misdemeanor trespass and felony conspiracy, the most serious charge.
The verdicts could mean a maximum of about five years in prison for each, public defender Anthony Gedeon indicated at a press conference Thursday. Sentencing is scheduled for August.
As the verdicts for each defendant were read, heads hung low in the packed courtroom gallery. Public defender Nuha Abusmara, who represents defendant River Allen, could be seen weeping.
The judge declared a mistrial for the deadlocked charges. The defense team said it will appeal the guilty verdicts.
Supporters of the defendants had packed the courtroom. When Judge Teresa Caffese began to thank the jury for its work, those in the audience began to cough in a seeming protest to the judge’s words. When Caffese ordered the courtroom cleared, those coughs turned to shouts directed at the jury.
Many cried “shame” on their way out. Others moaned in tears. Outside the courtroom, as the judge made her final remarks to the jury, protest chants filled the hall, including “Viva viva Palestina.”
On the day of the April 15, 2024 protest, the protesters drove onto the Golden Gate Bridge from Marin County, stopped their cars in a row, and extended their arms through pipes across all four lanes, physically blocking southbound traffic coming into the city for four hours.
One defendant, Sarah Cantor, acted as “police liaison” that day, and faced an additional misdemeanor charge of refusal to disperse at a riot. The jury found her guilty today, eliciting a collective sigh from those in the gallery.
The seven have become the main targets in a prosecution effort by District Attorney Brooke Jenkins who, in August 2024, filed charges against 26 protesters involved in the protest.
The district attorney’s office initially filed felony charges against eight protesters, but a judge dismissed one of those cases. Eighteen other protesters were charged with misdemeanors; their cases were diverted or dismissed.
The lead juror on Thursday morning informed the judge that, after several rounds of votes, the jury was hung 10-to-2 on the charges of felony conspiracy; 10 jurors had voted guilty. In another misdemeanor count, trespass to interfere with a business, 11 jurors voted not guilty, but one holdout meant that the jurors could not reach a unanimous decision. The judge declared a mistrial for those two counts.
The seven were facing prison sentences of up to 14 years if convicted of all charges. One was facing a maximum of 15. Their jury trial began six weeks ago.
Thursday’s hearing began with a bit of a false start. Some 120 people filled the courtroom in the morning after the defendants were ordered back to court after weeks of delay due to juror vacations — a strong indication that the jury had reached a conclusion. At the same time, another, unrelated group of around 120 people showed up to the same courtroom for jury duty selection, which had been assigned to the same room, causing confusion.
When the defendants walked back into the courtroom later that morning, dozens cheered and whistled in the hall.
The jury assigned to the trial of the remaining seven protesters began deliberating on Friday, June 5. Jurors were tasked with finding whether the defendants had committed the alleged crimes — including false imprisonment and trespassing to interfere with a business — beyond a reasonable doubt.
The jury reached that conclusion, seemingly swayed by arguments from prosecutors, including a closing statement from Assistant District Attorney Angela Roze on June 4 that presented a timeline of the protesters’ actions leading up to the blockade. They had met up in the East Bay the night before the protest, Roze said, and began assigning roles for the action.
Roze argued that those acts — along with others such as looking up legal justifications before the blockade — presented “circumstantial evidence” of the protesters’ intent to commit the crimes with which they were charged.
“Their motive may have been to get their lawmakers’ attention and stop the genocide in Gaza,” Roze said then. But, she argued, their intent was to stop traffic, and “they knew the crimes that they were going to engage in were illegal.”
News about the war and images from Gaza were central to many of the defense attorneys’ arguments, and their closing statements sought to convince the 12 jurors and five alternates that the protesters’ actions could not be isolated from their political beliefs.
“The state has done a wonderful job convincing you that the message of this protest doesn’t matter, that it’s separate from the act,” public defender Nuha Abusamra told the jury in her closing statement last month.
“The message is their intent,” Abusamra said then. “The message shows a lack of criminal thought … The message frees them. The message is protected by the law.”
One piece of defense evidence included the words of an Oakland judge, who said, “It is every individual’s obligation to confront the current siege in Gaza,” and those of Hind Rajab, a six-year-old Palestinian girl who was trapped in a car and killed by the Israeli military in 2024.
Defense attorney John Viola, who represented Sarah Ferrell, said there was “simply no criminal intent for any of these charges,” and thanked another defendant for “fulfilling a sacred duty … to bring Hind Rajab’s words into this courtroom.”
Other arguments made by the defense in June focused on the letter of the law itself — the penal code for obstructing a thoroughfare, for example, includes the phrase “willfully and maliciously.” Public defender Gedeon, who was the first to make a closing statement from the defense team, argued that the protesters’ actions were not malicious.
“No one was hurt, no one was harmed,” Gedeon said of the standstill traffic caused by the protesters’ blockade. “People were inconvenienced.”
In the case of false imprisonment, prosecutor Roze pointed to the protesters’ decision to block the bridge at “mid-span,” between its north and south towers and over the waters of the Golden Gate.
“This holds people hostage,” Roze said. The defense team refuted that claim.
“Being stuck in traffic is not being held hostage,” Abusamra said.
“What was in Sarah’s head? What was her intent?” asked attorney Jac Lyons, who represented the police liaison and defendant Sarah Cantor. Lyons argued that Cantor was not ordered to leave, that officers at the scene “valued her presence” and that they “valued having an open line of communication” between them and the other protesters.
The severity of the charges has been a dominant theme in and out of the courtroom. The Golden Gate Bridge has long been a venue for political protest. Past protests on the bridge, such as one in 2020 in the wake of the killing of George Floyd and in 1989 during the AIDS epidemic, resulted in comparably minor disturbances, and neither saw felony charges brought against participants.
“In the defense’s opinion, this is an overcharged case for protesting against genocide in Palestine,” Abusamra told Mission Local after a pre-trial hearing in May.
Defense attorney Shaffy Moeel made a similar argument to the jury in last month’s closing statements, calling the DA “overzealous,” and emphasizing to the jury that they alone were the authority in this case.
“An elected DA can be wrong,” Moeel said. “An elected DA can overreach.”
Did they really think that arguing they broke the law to make a random political statement meant they didn’t break the law?
Should have just pled guilty and done some community service.