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 crying.
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. After San Francisco Superior Court Judge Teresa Caffese thanked 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 southbound lanes, physically blocking 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.”
A jury of peers convicted them of violating the criminal statutes beyond a reasonable doubt, so one can’t credibly assert the DA went beyond community sentiment. I imagine that some jail time will be handed down, and that would, frankly, be the best option for the defendants as I think the DA will then decline to re-try the hung counts. A retrial would likely end in felony convictions. Also, the judge let in all the irrelevant gaza testimony, so this verdict seems appeal-proof.
Why is Brooke Jenkins wasting her time confined to San Francisco? She could become the U.S. Attorney General, working for Trump.
Short-sighted and selfish. The seven will now have plenty of time on their hands (in jail) to reflect on their actions. The Chronicle also noted that when announcing the charges the District Attorney had said that the demonstration caused “extreme threats to the health and welfare of those trapped” on the bridge, including a person with a brain tumor who missed a medical appointment, a disabled child on a school bus and a surgeon forced to cancel all operations that day.
Hurray! Criminal acts like this need consequences or they will happen again.
If you want to protest something in another country, don’t block a bridge in California. Use that bridge to go to the airport and fly to that country, while leaving the rest of us alone.
No wonder they were protesting. “The commission (UN’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry), which previously concluded that Israel bore responsibility for genocide in Gaza, found that children were targeted in two ways: directly, through precision weapons including quadcopters and sniper rifles, and indirectly, through the systematic destruction of the conditions necessary for their survival…. It named specific Israeli military units responsible for killings and urged the International Criminal Court (ICC) to prioritise crimes against children in its ongoing investigation.
In stark terms, the report accounted for at least 20,179 children killed and at least 44,143 children wounded in Gaza by the Zionist military.³ This represents 30% of those killed and 26% of those injured throughout the genocide.
The report also shows how children in the occupied West Bank are constantly attacked and abducted by settlers and often then sexually abused.⁴ Additionally, Zionist forces have detained over 1,655 children in the occupied West Bank since October 7th, 2023. Over 50% of child detainees were/are held under administrative detention, – Maura Finkelstein “The essence of childhood has been destroyed.”
“….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.”
For one to sincerely believe that blocking traffic on the Golden Gate Bridge would actually do a damn thing to alter the course of the conflict in Gaza, that takes an amount of stupidity and narcissism that rises to the level of malice.
I’m delighted they were convicted, though sad about the mistrial on the felony charges.
Now I hope they get the maximum jail sentence possible.
We need a deterrent to acts like this. These narcissists shut down a major bridge to virtue signal about something happening IN ANOTHER COUNTRY. We can’t have nutcases like these shutting down a bridge any time they don’t like something going on anywhere in the world.
5 years in jail would be just about right. And I hope they are retried on the felony charge: a 10-2 vote for conviction is promising.
Love and support to the protestors. Shame on Brooke Jenkins, ADA Roze, and these jurors. The charges are ridiculous and are designed to shut us up, to have a chilling effect on protest, and to make us accept atrocities. We can’t let it work.
You want a big fat list “atrocities” to protest? There have been 66,000 + Islamic terrorist attacks since 1979, that have murdered almost 250,000 people. Why aren’t you protesting those “atrocities”?
Direct action protest like this used to work before the neoliberal period because before that, people in power could be shamed by protest into doing the right thing.
Those in power have long since dispensed with the weakness and vulnerability of shame, and as we all know you can’t shame the shameless.
Those in power are unified that they will shut down direct action protest like this. We’ve recently seen draconian punishments in Fort Worth Texas as well as these.
This particular action was questionable. The point of the action is to elevate the issue publicly. The issue with the execution here is that they blocked the bridge for many hours because they locked down and refused to vacate.
Would the protest have been any less effective had they not locked down and been cleared in 30 minutes? The time matters because part of protest is to build popular support for a change of policy on an issue and if the public who you’re trying to convince is being inconvenienced significantly, then that diminishes the effectiveness of protest.
In 1986 I was part of the UT-16 who occupied the offices of the president of the University of Texas at Austin demanding divestment from university funds invested in firms doing business in apartheid South Africa.
We did not lock down, just barricaded the doors with desks. We did not resist arrest and were relatively peacefully taken into custody. The campus cops were dicks because Texas.
We ended up going on trial in 1987 for disruptive activities and were convicted of an entry level misdemeanor, basically the TX equivalent of an infraction in CA. I was sentenced to 90 days in county jail, but the case was not decided to finality upon appeal until the mid 90s after I’d established myself in SF. Now, if I have to go back to Texas, I avoid driving or if I do, drive like a 70 year old. Nobody gets extradited for a misdemeanor.
These sentences were outliers for similar actions of the day. People in Berkeley and UMASS got slaps on the wrist for similar conduct.
When Nelson Mandela’s people put out a call for solidarity, it is difficult not to respond favorably. The best part is that we were grains of sand in a mountain built globally that took down the apartheid regime.
Winning is sweet.
Perhaps those so quick to make snarky comments about the protestors, might look again at our governments’ past AND present support (and thus our own) of the murderous regime leading the people of Israel, as they murdered and continue to murder innocent children and civilians in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon. Perhaps they think that they as citizens of this country, carry no responsibility IF they look away? And so with the blood on their hands they can sneer at the young who could not look away, without trying to get their fellow country folk to pay attention.
Was it effective? Seemingly not. Most research shows protests that impede onlookers result in negative responses. So it was not the most effective medium. But at least they tried to wake their fellow Americans up to the horrors happening in Palestine with our tax money and our governments consent. None of us are innocent. So Lord please spare us your armchair judgment of these young hearts, who at least tried to raise awareness in the hearts and minds of their fellow funders of Netanyahu’s murderous rampage.
Title is framing this in a disingenuous way. It should say Jury still deliberates on possible felony charges. Instead you frame it as if it’s inevitable. Be better.
the case was overcharged, but they CANNOT be sent to PRISON on misdemeanors!
Thousands of people protest on a daily basis and do so in a respectful manner that doesn’t harm or injure others or their ability to go about their day without outside unwanted interference. When your right to protest impacts someone else’s right to travel or move from one location to another, then your right to protest must yield and stop harming someone else. If it doesn’t, then you will have to face the music of your ill-advised choice. This is not a difficult concept to understand unless you are too self-absorbed, selfish, and disrespectful of the rights of others.
This comment is an exact carbon copy of the stuff people said about protests that won Black civil rights in the South, ended the Vietnam War, ended South African apartheid, etc. and will age equally as poorly. Protest isn’t supposed to be convenient.
The outcome was not surprising. 5 is better than 10. Should have thought about the various perspectives of the many vs. the few. Also, should had looked into the pros/cons of the cause and effects. Yup, you have 1st. amendments rights, but there are limits and restrictions when reading details of unprotected free speech.
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.
Random political statement?
Thousands murdered by the Israeli government, a client of major Bay Area tech companies. It’s a twisted legal system that holds protesters accountable instead of those profiting from genocide.
Agreed but if they each get five years then I will be comfortable. There must be deterrence here.