On Aug. 12, 2024, San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins filed charges against 26 people who, months prior, had blocked the Golden Gate Bridge in a pro-Palestine protest for four hours.
She charged eight of them with felony conspiracy and other misdemeanors, including 38 counts of false imprisonment.
They faced years in prison — more than a decade for those with felony charges — in a prosecution that ran two years, until a lengthy jury trial in the spring.
The outcome? Most cases were diverted or dismissed, and the seven who went to trial saw a handful of misdemeanor convictions against them, deadlocked felony charges, and 30-day jail sentences. Those seven plan to appeal their jail sentences, and will see weeks at most.
How much did it cost to get here?
The defendants say around $600,000 in tax dollars, and possibly more. That’s according to an analysis led by Nicky Gott, a software engineer who was among the 26 arrested on the bridge.
Gott assembled a 15-page spreadsheet estimating some of the costs involved in arresting, trying and prosecuting all 26 bridge protesters. For most figures, Gott used “conservative” and “best guess” estimates of government salaries and other public funds.
Gott’s analysis estimates that the costs of the recent trial, including the prosecutors, judge, jury, sheriff’s deputies and courthouse staff, amounted to somewhere between $218,000 and $255,000.
The defense lawyers — two of whom were public defenders, five court-appointed, and all paid by the public — accounted for some $282,000, based on dollar figures obtained directly from the defense team, Gott said.
All told, somewhere between $575,981 and $652,737 went into arresting, charging, prosecuting, and defending the protestors since the April 15, 2024 protest, according to the analysis summary.
The summary notes that it does not account for certain costs, like DA and defense investigators’ pay, and pre-trial lawyers. It also does not include what it would cost if any of the protesters are incarcerated in the future — currently around $127,788 per year, per inmate.
Legal experts contacted by Mission Local to check Gott’s work described the analysis as plausible, if lacking context.
“It doesn’t surprise me to see numbers of this magnitude,” said John Donohue, Stanford Law professor and empirical researcher.
Robert Weisberg, another Stanford Law professor who teaches criminal law and founded the Stanford Criminal Justice Center, described Gott’s analysis as “intellectually honest,” but said the dollar figure alone is “not a big shock.”
“The real issue here is what cases they didn’t prosecute, or which cases they prosecuted much more cheaply because they were doing this.”
Robert weisberg, Stanford criminal justice center
“Everything in criminal justice costs something,” Weisberg added. “All these people are going to be working and making money every day anyway.”
A proper academic analysis, said George Fisher, also a professor at Stanford Law, and leader of its criminal prosecution clinic, would likely draw a distinction between which costs represented an extra use of taxpayer funds versus fixed costs like staffing a courthouse. Gott’s does not.
Plus, an analysis would need to go beyond this case in order to make a more noteworthy comparative argument about the DA’s priorities.
“The real issue here,” said Weisberg, “is what cases they didn’t prosecute, or which cases they prosecuted much more cheaply because they were doing this.”
Jenkins did not comment on Gott’s numbers, but said that she stood by her decision to prosecute.
“I believe that we have sent the appropriate message to them that this type of behavior is not something that can happen,” the DA said.
Seen one way, the resources that went into this case tower over the misdemeanor convictions and light sentences that followed. But the hope of deterring future behavior plays a significant role in the resources prosecutors devote to a given case, the Stanford law professors said.
“When framing whether this prosecution was worth the costs, the ultimate sentence is relevant, but it’s not the only relevant thing,” said Fisher, who also worked as a prosecutor.
Donohue, the empirical researcher, put it another way: “I do think it’s valuable information to know how much criminal cases cost and think about whether it’s worth it,” he said.
“But,” he added, “the major function of criminal law is to deter socially harmful behavior.”
Jenkins believes she has done just that.
“This isn’t about incarcerating people for some excessive period of time,” she said. “It’s about making sure that we found the right form of accountability for what took place on that bridge.”
That day, more than two dozen protesters took the Golden Gate Bridge for about four hours to protest Israel’s assault on Gaza. They chained their arms together through plastic metal tubes, and brought traffic to a standstill. The protest came several months after a separate pro-Palestine action blocked the Bay Bridge for several hours.
Jenkins added that the protest itself incurred “a number of other costs,” including the loss of potential bridge tolls and potential income for wage workers.
“To leave that out is dishonest,” Jenkins said.
In 2025, the Golden Gate Bridge Highway and Transportation District sought $163,000 in restitution from the protesters; the agency withdrew that claim a month later. The protesters later paid $5,300 to nine commuters for lost wages, KQED reported.
Last month, each defendant was charged with more than $1,000 in fines as part of their sentencing.
Meanwhile, many of the estimated costs in the analysis can be attributed to the lengthy jury trial last spring, which could have been avoided if the defendants accepted a plea deal. “We made what we believed was a fair offer, in this case, to each of them,” said Jenkins, but declined to share further details.
According to defense attorney John Viola, Jenkins offered two plea deals, one of which would have required pleading guilty to a felony and working for 60 days of labor under the sheriff’s work program, and another requiring a guilty plea to misdemeanor charges and working for 90 days.
Viola also said he was told that the DA’s office would not hinder efforts to expunge those felonies from the protestors’ criminal records.
When asked, Jenkins said she does not consider taxpayer cost when prosecuting.
“My job is to prosecute crime,” she said. “It is not to try to minimize cost for the courthouse.”
