Yale Arrestees Seek To Dismiss Charges

More than 40 Yale student protesters who were arrested en masse at a pro-Palestinian encampment in Beinecke Plaza last semester are calling for a state judge to throw out their criminal trespassing charges on the grounds that they weren’t all properly notified before Yale police started making arrests.

That’s one of the key legal arguments detailed in a motion to dismiss and accompanying memorandum filed in state court on Wednesday by attorneys Greta LaFleur and Abigail Mason on behalf of 42 different Yale student defendants.

“The 42 Defendants named in the caption above respectfully move this court to dismiss this prosecution, pursuant to Conn. Gen. Stat. § 54 – 56; Connecticut Practice Book § 41 – 8; the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution; and Article First §§ 8 and 9, of the Connecticut Constitution, for insufficient evidence or cause to justify the continuing of the information and the placing of the defendant[s] on trial,” the legal filing reads.

“The facts alleged in the police report do not satisfy the statutory elements that comprise the offense charges, and the State is unable to carry its burden and prove that the defendants committed a violation of CT. Gen. Stat. 53a-107.”

The state’s attorney’s office has not yet filed a response to the motion to dismiss; the arrested Yale students in question, who have not yet entered pleas to these charges, are next scheduled to appear in court on Oct. 31.

All 42 students covered by this motion to dismiss were arrested by Yale police in the early morning of Monday, April 22, as campus cops cleared a tent encampment from Yale’s Beinecke Plaza. Those tents had stood for three days and nights as part of a student-led protest calling for Yale to divest from all weapons manufacturers in connection to Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza.

The Yale encampment took place amid a surge in overnight pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses across the nation following the mass arrest of Columbia students by the New York Police Department a few days prior.

In New Haven, Yale police wound up arresting a total of 48 people — each on one misdemeanor count of first-degree criminal trespassing — as part of the Beinecke encampment. (They made four more campus arrests following a separate protest on May 1.)

In the intervening months, including during a hearing at the state courthouse at 121 Elm St. on Thursday, a handful of those Yale student arrestees struck deals with the state’s attorney’s office to have the criminal charges dropped in exchange for ​“simple trespassing” infractions, accompanied by $50 fines.

A vast majority of the Yale student arrestees, however, have chosen to move forward with their cases — and try to have the charges dismissed. Thus Wednesday’s motion. On Wednesday and Thursday in Courtroom A at 121 Elm St., state Superior Court Judge Frank Ianotti agreed to continue case after case after case to follow-up hearing dates on Oct. 31. He didn’t hear arguments on the motion to dismiss but will when everyone’s back in court. (Click here to read about a 100-person protest that took place on the front steps of the courthouse on Wednesday in support of the arrestees.)

Yale students and their allies crowded into the ground-floor courtroom on Thursday, wearing black-and-white and red-and-white keffiyehs, as they took their turns standing alongside LaFleur and Mason to request continuances.

Each appearance before the judge lasted just a few seconds, with no substantive discussion among the students, attorneys, or state’s attorney David Strollo about the legal grounds of the motion to dismiss.

That latter argument is laid out in detail, however, across 37 pages of legal filings from Aug. 28.

The motion to dismiss raises a host of questions about what happens when dozens of students are arrested all at once on identical charges as part of a campus protest — and comes as at least one other prosecutor, Alvin Bragg in New York City, has decided to drop most charges against a different set of student arrestees on the grounds of lack of evidence.

For previous articles about these protests and arrests at Yale, a university spokesperson has emphasized Yale’s support for free speech and peaceable assembly, and has said that university police made arrests only when protesters did not follow police orders to disperse.

Dispersal Order Wasn't "Personally Communicated"

The Yale students’ motion to dismiss makes a number of arguments: that Yale police did not give the students a proper amount of time to comply with their order to leave before being arrested; that campus police may have made arrests before issuing their order to leave; and that Yale police may not have been properly ​“authorized” by the legal owner of Beinecke Plaza to make these dispersal orders in the first place.

Much of the motion, however, hinges on one particular legal argument: that the state cannot prove that Yale police ​“personally communicated” to each student that they had to leave before being arrested.

LaFleur and Mason note that state statute 53a-107 requires that an order to leave must be ​“personally communicated” to someone in order for them to be found guilty of first-degree criminal trespassing.

Referencing the Yale Police Department’s arrest report for all 48 people who were taken into custody on April 22, the students’ lawyers state that Yale Police Chief Anthony Campbell issued an initial warning to the campers at 6:38 a.m., telling them they would have to leave or be arrested. He issued his last warning at 7:35 a.m. Students were subsequently arrested between 6:45 a.m. and 8:30 a.m.

“First and foremost: when the first warning was issued at 6:38 a.m., almost two dozen students were still asleep in their tents,” the motion to dismiss reads. ​“The first arrests occurred, according to the police report, seven minutes later. It is unreasonable to assume that over the course of a 30-second announcement, every student of the more than 100 who were camping in Beinecke Plaza would have woken up and heard the full announcement.”

Second, the attorneys continue, 55 minutes transpired between the last police warning at 7:35 a.m. and the last arrest at 8:30 a.m.

“The State cannot prove that every student who was arrested on April 22nd, 2024, had participated in the encampment, or had camped overnight in Hewitt Quadrangle / Beinecke Plaza,” the lawyers write. ​“Each summons only proves the arrested student’s presence at the time of arrest, and student testimony will demonstrate that some students entered Hewitt Quadrangle / Beinecke Plaza on the morning of April 22nd, 2024 — and were permitted to do so by YPD officers — in order to retrieve their property which they had learned would be confiscated in the event of arrests.”

Finally, the lawyers write, at least in regards to this concern that the state cannot prove that every student was ​“personally notified” before being arrested, Beinecke Plaza sits in the center of a university that has more than 12,000 undergraduate and graduate students.

“The sheer number of students who live in dorms within a quarter mile of Hewitt Quadrangle / Beinecke Plaza, premises that host both a library and the biggest dining hall on campus, on a Monday morning during the semester, does not furnish a reasonable inference that every single student arrested on Hewitt Quadrangle / Beinecke Plaza on the morning of April 22, 2024, would have been present to hear the final order to leave at 7:35 a.m.”