Sept. 21 (UPI) — The California attorney general’s office dropped all felony charges Monday against five Stanford University students who took part in a campus protest against Israel’s attacks on Gaza.
The students had faced prison sentences and thousands of dollars in restitution in connection with the charges of felony conspiracy to trespass and felony vandalism, The Guardian reported. They were part of a group of 12 students who barricaded themselves inside the university president’s office for an hour in June 2024, asking that Stanford divest itself from companies connected to Israel.
Five of the students went to trial in early 2026 over the charges. The trial ended in a hung jury, and a judge later ordered in May that the Santa Clara county district attorney, Jeff Rosen, recuse himself from the case over a conflict of interest, The Guardian said.
The California attorney general’s office took over the case and reached a resolution that includes dropping all charges in return for 100 hours of community service and total restitution of about $50,000.
“We believe this outcome serves the best interests of the community and all parties involved,” said a spokesperson from the state attorney general’s office.
Three students who earlier accepted plea deals will also have convictions overturned after completing community service.
The San Francisco Bay Area office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the largest Muslim civil rights organization in the United States, responded to the agreement Monday, saying that “advocacy for Palestinian rights should not be subjected to harsher treatment than other forms of political expression.”
“We welcome the attorney general’s decision not to pursue another trial and the court’s approval of a path to dismissal,” Zahra Billoo, CAIR-SFBA executive director, said in a statement. “These students should never have faced felony charges for their part in a campus protest. Treating protest activity as felony conduct was disproportionate from the outset, and putting them through another trial after more than two years, a mistrial and the disqualification of the district attorney’s office because of a conflict of interest would only have compounded that harm.”
The students who briefly occupied the president’s office were arrested, suspended and banned from campus for two years. Rosen did not announce the felony charges against them until April 2025.
Rosen was removed from the case after the students’ legal teams submitted evidence that he was using it to fundraise for his re-election campaign on a platform of fighting “antisemitism,” although the students were not charged with hate crimes.
Source: U.S. News
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