BY BRADEN CARTWRIGHT
Daily Post Staff Writer
The 13 students who were arrested in June for allegedly breaking in to the Stanford president’s office and spray painting the building in a protest are in a state of limbo, because it is unknown if they’ll face criminal charges or not.
Stanford said in October that its police officers sent the case to Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen to consider prosecuting the protesters.
But Rosen’s spokesman Sean Webby has repeatedly said the DA hasn’t received the case, so Rosen can’t file charges or make any comment.
The case has received extra attention because one student who was arrested, Dilan Gohill, said he was there to cover the event as a reporter for the Stanford Daily student newspaper.
But Stanford officials said Gohill had no right to be barricaded inside the president’s offices that were vandalized in a pro-Palestinian protest.
“We believe that the Daily reporter reporting from inside the building acted in violation of the law and university policies and fully supported having him be criminally prosecuted,” Stanford said in a statement on June 10.
Webby has fielded questions from at least 14 reporters since the arrests on June 5. They want to know where the case stands and if the students will be charged with felony burglary like police officers wrote on their tickets.
Webby has given reporters the same answer: “There are no charges. We have not yet received the cases for a review.”
Stanford spokeswoman Luisa Rapport gave a different answer in an email on Oct. 9. “Student protesters who were arrested last spring have cases pending with the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office,” Rapport said in an email. She referred further questions to Rosen’s office on Dec. 3.
Reporters have asked Webby why the case has taken more than seven months and when the investigation will be finished.
“Depends,” Webby said in a one-word email on June 13 to Susannah Luthi, a reporter from the Washington Free Beacon.
The Post filed a California Public Records Act request with the county on Dec. 4 for all records related to Stanford protesters.
In response, Deputy County Counsel Hilary Kerrigan said most records are exempt because they relate to a police investigation.
She provided 425 pages of emails between Webby and reporters from June to December. Emails between Rosen’s employees were blacked out.
For example, Assistant District Attorney Brian Welch sent a four-line email to Rosen and Webby on June 5 that’s entirely blacked out except for the last line, “We will keep everyone updated.”
Prosecutors have one year to file misdemeanor charges and three years to file a felony case, according to state law.
A group of Stanford alumni wrote a letter on Dec. 9 to Stanford President Jonathan Levin and Provost Jenny Martinez asking them to have Rosen drop the charges against Gohill.
“Putting Dilan under threat and leaving him in limbo amounted to unconscionable punishment-by-delay,” the letter said. “The university should well know that the long pendency of disciplinary proceedings can gravely damage a student’s mental health and wellbeing.”
The letter was signed by alumni Andrew Bridges, Rich Jaroslovsky and James Wascher. The Student Press Law Center and the First Amendment Coalition are also baking Gohill. “Dilan has been held in limbo for far too long,” said attorney Mike Hiestand from the Student Press Law Center.
Levin told the Stanford Daily on Dec. 15 that Stanford doesn’t have a position on whether Gohill should be prosecuted, a reversal from Stanford’s initial position. “That’s entirely the domain of Santa Clara County,” Levin said, according to a Q&A.
Student protesters broke into the offices at dawn, barricaded themselves inside and stayed there for three hours. Messages were spray painted on the inside and outside of the building, photos show.
Demonstrators cheered in support of those being arrested as the detainees were escorted out of the building and loaded into police vehicles. One police officer was lightly injured when he was shoved by protesters, the university said.
“The situation on campus has now crossed the line from peaceful protest to actions that threaten the safety of our community,” interim President Richard Saller and Martinez said in a statement after the protest.
Students who participated in the protest were suspended, and any seniors weren’t allowed to graduate, the university said at the time.
Those arrested were:
Eliana Lindsay Fuchs, 24, of San Mateo;
Isabella Terrazas, 22, of Houston;
Hunter Armstrong Taylor-Black, 24, of Chestnut Hill, Pa.;
Dilan Suraj Gohill, 19, of Santa Monica;
Taylor Oh McCann, 32, of Oakland;
Gretchen Rose Guimarin, 22, of Rancho Cordova;
John Thomas Richardson, 19, of Menlo Park;
Kaiden Wang, 22, of Elk Grove;
German Rafael Gonzalez, 20, of Stanford;
Cameron Michael Pennington, 22, of Stanford;
Zoe Georgia Edelman, 23, of Washington, D.C.;
Maya Nell Murungi Burke, 28, of Frankfort, Ky.;
and Amy Jing Zhu, 20, of Thousand Oaks.
As a previous participant in protest occupations at Stanford during the late 1960s & 1970s and an alumnus of a Stanford graduate program (economics PhD), I hope the University administration recognizes the educational benefits of such protests and drops all charges. Back then, we learned far more doing the research prior to and during such occupations than we were learning in our courses. Think of it as “field research”.