Last UNC pro-Palestinian protest cases dropped. DA cites judge’s ruling in decision.
An Orange County district attorney has dismissed the last eight cases stemming from arrests at the pro-Palestinian protests on the UNC-Chapel Hill campus last spring.
The decision came a week after District Court Judge Samantha Cabe dismissed second-degree trespassing charges against Charles Soeder, one of the 39 people arrested at the protests.
District Attorney Jeff Neiman also dismissed cases against another five defendants last week. Four had been charged with trespassing; the fifth was charged with trespassing and resisting a public officer, court records show.
In her official order filed this week, Cabe said the prosecution failed to submit sufficient evidence, despite testimony at Friday’s hearing from a Fayetteville State University police officer, to prove the “Defendant’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.”
The order did not mention defense attorney arguments that an April encampment on campus was protected by the First Amendment, and that pro-Palestinian protesters were exercising their constitutional right to protest in a public space.
On Thursday, Nieman said he decided to dismiss the remaining eight cases after reading the judge’s order. Those defendants were charged with second-degree trespassing, and one had an additional charge of resist, delay and obstruct, records show.
“In light of the ruling on the case last week, and our evaluation of the evidence in the remaining cases, we do not think that we will prevail at trial and we are deciding to dismiss the cases,” Nieman said.
Attorneys call decision ‘a major victory’
Several protests have been held this year on the Chapel Hill campus and outside the courthouse on Franklin Street to show solidarity with Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. On May 8, three protesters were charged when a crowd attempted to block the vehicle of a UNC provost leaving campus. At least 13 protesters were UNC students or former students at the time.
Defense attorneys called the dismissals “a major victory for free speech and justice” in a joint statement Friday.
“It was clear that the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was engaged in conduct to silence the valid and cogent criticism of UNC’s reluctance to divest from an apartheid,” attorney Pooyan Ordoubadi said, calling it “a shame” the district attorney’s office prosecuted the charges at all.
The protesters have demanded that UNC acknowledge “the genocide in Palestine,” disclose and divest from investments in companies that support Israel, and end study-abroad programs in Israel.
Their attorneys have argued the arrests were unconstitutional.
The UNC encampment was protected by the First Amendment, attorney Gina Balamucki said in a court filing, and the protesters were exercising their constitutional right to protest in a public space without blocking pedestrians, risking public safety or disrupting UNC operations..
While the order to remove the encampment referred to people entering classroom buildings overnight, it did not say who was involved, how that violated university policy or how it differed from the normal use of campus buildings, she said.
“UNC did not have any constitutional grounds to justify the violent mass arrest of activists that occurred on April 30, 2024,” Balamucki said in Friday’s release. “We hope that UNC will recognize the protesters’ victory as a resounding rebuke, showing that it cannot arbitrarily arrest people for speaking out. The administrators should be ashamed to have carried out this attack upon the free speech values they pretend to hold dear.”
Challenging cases to prosecute
Nieman noted that another 25 people charged in the spring protests have accepted plea deals for deferred prosecution or a conditional discharge. Their charges will be dismissed once they complete community service requirements and pay court costs.
He declined to elaborate about why his office didn’t have more evidence in the cases that were dismissed, but noted it’s not enough to say a person was part of a group that broke the law. Each case has to be individually proven, he said.
“My (assistant district attorneys) pored through this evidence tirelessly for probably hundreds of hours, with all the body cam review and everything else to do their best to ascertain who made the arrests, who took different enforcement actions,” Nieman said.
“It was a chaotic situation, and I think that caused challenges for the law enforcement officers to pass along the information we normally expect in preparation for a trial,” he said.
There will be conversations in his office about what happened and with university officials about how to avoid similar challenges in the future, Nieman said, noting the many Silent Sam protest cases he handled several years ago.
Those cases are “taxing, they take a lot of time, they’re very stressful ... and they also very often involve low-level crimes,” he said.
But “every case is a learning opportunity, and we learn some things about what we can do and what local law enforcement can do, and use what we learn from this to do the best we can with these types of cases going forward,” he said.
This story was originally published December 20, 2024 at 9:20 AM.
