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A Providence judge has issued a not guilty filing for 41 Brown University pro-Palestinian protestors who were arrested for trespassing last semester.
Judge Nicholas Parrillo said he was going against the objections of the city of Providence and Brown University in issuing the not guilty filing to the protestors because none of them had a criminal record, and because he said he thinks they held a respectful protest.
“I think this is a reflection of what nonviolent and peaceful resistance, frankly, is supposed to look like,” he said.
A not guilty filing means that the students will have to stay out of legal trouble for the next six months. If they do that, the charges against them will be completely cleared after that period of time. An attorney for the students told them it was significant.
The university did not respond to a request for comment by deadline.
University president Christina Paxson previously declined to seek to have the trespassing charges dropped, despite a formal recommendation from a university advisory body and pleas from faculty members. In her letter to the advisory body, she said it would be a “mistake” to drop the charges.
“The practice of civil disobedience means accepting the consequences of decisions on matters of conscience,” said Paxson.
The 41 students were arrested while protesting after hours in University Hall, an administrative building on December 11. The students had been asking for their university to divest from companies they say facilitate human rights abuses in Palestine.
Kate Kuli is a junior at Brown University, and was among those in court Tuesday. She was relieved the charges will not show up on her record in background checks, provided she is not re-arrested in the next six months. However, because she plans to apply to law school, she said she still will have to write on her application that she was once arrested. She also said she continued to be disappointed in the university.
“For Brown to want to escalate things on the criminal, legal side, I feel is kind of unnecessary and sets a dangerous precedent for the future,” said Kuli.
In November, 20 Jewish students were arrested on the same charge for protesting the same topic in the same building, also after hours. However, the school asked for those charges to be dropped after a Palestinian junior from the university was shot in Burlington, Vermont, in what police were investigating as a hate crime.
Historically the school has dismissed some charges for some students in similar protests. The Providence Journal reported in 1992 that the school struck a deal with 76 student protesters who were protesting what they saw as discriminatory financial aid practices.
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