UMass students and others arrested during protests in May face court again

UMass students, faculty and others arrested during a pro-Palestinian demonstration will appear in court again this week and next week.

Preliminary hearings are scheduled for the more than 100 people who were charged after the University of Massachusetts chancellor issued the controversial order to police to clear the protest camp on May 7.

Attorney Rachel Weber said she is part of a small group of lawyers representing the majority of those arrested. Weber said prosecutors have begun making plea deals to some of their clients.

“But this is still in the early stages. So we have to wait and see how many people are offered which measures,” Weber said on Friday. “And the people who have been arrested may need some time to think about the different effects of these measures. And then we can decide what to do after that.”

As with the May arraignments, the preliminary hearings will last more than a week in the small Eastern Hampshire District Court in Belchertown, beginning on Monday.

Weber said the charges include trespassing, failure to disperse the assembly and resisting state authority.

She said UMass also informed the arrested students that they faced possible disciplinary action from the university.

“We have tried to coordinate faculty support for these students and, where necessary, to provide legal support to those students who now have to deal with both criminal court charges and disciplinary proceedings,” she said.

For many of those arrested, the past few months have been very stressful, said Weber.

“This really could have been resolved in a much more calm and peaceful way,” she said. “So many people were arrested, not for committing any kind of civil disobedience, but simply for being swept along by a crowd, even many hours after there had been warnings to disperse.”

Since the arrests, Weber said, the defense team has received hundreds of hours of video footage from the prosecution, including both police bodycam footage and officers’ cellphone footage.

“We’ve been working on figuring out how best to organize this data, go through it, analyze it, categorize it and things like that,” she said. “That was a big part of the work.”

University of Massachusetts Chancellor Javier Reyes faced criticism – including a vote of no confidence from the faculty – for ordering police to break up the protest, which he said “posed a significant danger.”

A UMass spokesman did not immediately respond Saturday afternoon to a request for comment on the pretrial conferences or whether Reyes had made any recommendations to prosecutors.

A spokesman for Northwest District Attorney David Sullivan said in a text message Saturday that the office “does not comment on proposed injunctions in advance because they always have the potential to fail.”

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