Felony charges dropped against Golden Gate Bridge protesters

A two-year legal battle over a dramatic protest against the war on Gaza came to an end on Friday as seven protesters who’d blocked traffic on the Golden Gate Bridge received 30-day sentences and $1,000 fines.

Over two dozen activists halted several lanes of traffic on the bridge on April 15, 2024, six months into Israel’s war in the Palestinian territory that has been widely recognized as a genocide. San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins charged 26 of them with crimes. Most were offered diversion, in the form of fines and community service, but Jenkins hit seven protesters with a raft of serious charges, including felony conspiracy.

Six of the seven defendants — Sarah Ferrell, Conrad de Jesus, Em Tillotson, and Bhavika Anandpura of Oakland and Rocky Chau and River Allen of Richmond — had locked themselves together in order to halt commuter traffic coming into the city. A seventh, Sara Cantor, had served as a police liaison.

After a two-and-a-half-week trial, jurors deadlocked in June over the most serious charges but convicted the protesters on several misdemeanors, including obstructing a thoroughfare, unlawful assembly, and four counts of false imprisonment related to trapped commuters.

Jenkins’ office had considered a new trial on the conspiracy charges, but assistant district attorney Angela Roze announced on Friday that the remaining charges would all be dropped.

Jordan Harger, one of the 19 defendants who had received diversion, described that decision as something of a relief. “We were absolutely worried there’d be a new trial,” Harger said. “Brooke Jenkins has made harsh choices throughout this process.”

Each of the seven defendants, their spokesperson Raye Kahn said, received a 30-day sentence, which would include a combination of jail time and time in a county sheriff work program, as well as six months probation and a fine of $1,000. The defendants would get credit for time served for the four days they were held pretrial, which would probably leave them each serving no more than 15 days in jail.

The defendants’ attorneys, Kahn said, all plan to appeal the verdicts.

At trial, Roze argued that the protesters had cost the bridge authority thousands of dollars in lost tolls and had inconvenienced Bay Area residents, some of whom missed doctors’ appointments or work meetings.

The defendants argued that the protest, part of a global day of action known as A15, was a desperate attempt to stop the war on Gaza and halt a planned Israeli incursion into Rafah, where some 1.5 million refugees were sheltered. “The executive branch was completely failing us,” Ferrell said on the stand. “The legislative branch was failing us. Civil society was failing us. There were no avenues left.”

Jenkins, in a statement, said she encourages civil discourse and First Amendment rights but the prosecutions serve “as a reminder that when such acts become unlawful and compromise public safety that there will have to be consequences.”

“We hope that imposing a custodial sentence will hopefully act as a deterrent to future criminal conduct by others considering blockading a bridge,” she said.

Given the multiple misdemeanor convictions, the seven defendants could have faced years in jail. But Harger still described the jail sentences as “devastating.” Harger said the four days the 26 original defendants spent in jail convinced them that San Francisco jails are unsafe and dangerous, with detainees facing inadequate nutrition and frigid cold.

“It is not possible to call anything that’s transpired justice,” Harger said. “This entire case has been punitive due to the substance of our speech and the focus of our protest. We’ve been punished because we were speaking about Palestine.”

The felony charges brought by Jenkins’ office were unusual for acts of civil disobedience in San Francisco. Golden Gate Bridge actions over the years to protest AIDS inaction, the environment, and Black Lives Matter resulted in misdemeanor charges or no charges at all.

This story was originally published by The Oaklandside and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.