The Michigan attorney general’s office dropped charges this week against two people charged with trespassing during a police raid on a pro-Palestinian encampment at the University of Michigan.
A hearing for defendants Josiah Walker and Salma Hamamy was scheduled for next week, but the Ann Arbor District Court judge presiding over the case cancelled it after signing off on the dismissal motion on Tuesday. Hamamy was a student during the month-long encampment while Walker was taking a year off from coursework, but has since resumed his undergraduate studies.
Walker said he feels relieved. The uncertainty around the case and the time it took to review court materials kept him from being able to focus fully on his studies, he said.
Since the charges were announced in September, he said, “I couldn’t just focus on attending class or like participating in the commitments that I wanted to because I had to deal with the most powerful law enforcement official in the entire state.”
His attorney, Doraid Elder, said he believed a jury would have affirmed that both Walker and Hamamy’s actions during the encampment raid fell within their right to demonstrate publicly as outlined in the First Amendment.
The dismissal, he said, “gives them the ability to move forward in life and to one day tell their children or grandchildren about how they stood up against injustice and how they stood their ground.”
Walker and Hamamy had joined with many other students and community members to set up a tent encampment on the large open space on the Ann Arbor campus called the Diag, to call on U of M leaders to divest from Israeli companies and cut ties with institutions because of that country’s military action in Gaza following the Hamas-led attack on October 7, 2023.
The dismissal of this case follows the same action on the cases against seven other protesters charged with felony resisting arrest in addition to misdemeanors for trespassing.
A spokesperson for the attorney general’s office said the rationale for dismissing the case against Walker and Hamamy was "consistent with" its reasons for dismissing charges against the other seven defendants. In a previous statement Attorney General Dana Nessel decried the “circus-like atmosphere” of the legal proceedings.
“While I stand by my charging decisions, and believe, based on the evidence, a reasonable jury would find the defendants guilty of the crimes alleged,” Nessel said, “I no longer believe these cases to be a prudent use of my department’s resources, and, as such, I have decided to dismiss the cases.”
Defense attorneys in the felony cases argued Nessel had “cherry-picked” them, saying that the state attorney general tended not to bring low level charges such as resisting arrest or trespassing. They also pointed to statements she made previously — including decrying a pro-Palestinian rallying cry that defendants had used as “antisemitic” — to argue that she couldn’t serve as a neutral prosecutor on the case.
Nessel shot back at those claims at an event in West Bloomfield Township recorded and shared on the social media platform X by independent journalist Brendan Gutenschwager days after those dismissals.
"It's illegal to have an encampment" on campus, Nessel said. "No one gets to do that."
She also noted that while her office reviewed cases of “dozens and dozens of people” involved in the encampment, she had only brought charges against those whose actions were “criminal in nature,” including those who had placed items in front of police officers or pushed up against them.
“In my career, I've never seen anybody be able to treat a police officer that way while they were in the course of executing a legal order and not get charged with anything,” she said. “They were simply being treated, not differently than other people, but treated the exact same as anyone else who engaged in that kind of conduct against police officers.”
In her remarks at the townhall, Nessel pushed back on questions Ann Arbor District Court Judge Cedric Simpson asked to understand how her office had come to take up the cases instead of the county prosecutor, arguing that “so much of everything that happened with this case involves antisemitism at levels and in areas, formally, frankly, that I've not seen before, not experienced as an attorney, certainly not as attorney general.”
Nessel claimed that she was accused of taking up the case at the suggestion of “Jewish Regents” at U of M or at the behest of “Jewish donors.”
“So now we're at a point,” she said, “where I'm being — the Jewish attorney general is being — investigated.”
But defense attorneys claim that it was the attorney general’s office that first brought up her Jewish identity. In a court filing, they said that their motion for a recusal was “based on her conduct — her public statements and the unusual way in which this case made its way to her office,” not her faith.
They had pointed out how low-level charges such as resisting arrest and trespass tend to be handled by city attorneys or county prosecutors.
Michigan Public found that the state’s top prosecutor rarely pursued cases in which the sole charge was trespassing in a review of biennial reports of cases from the attorney general’s office over the first four years of Nessel’s tenure. More recent reports haven’t been published.
Most of the trespass charges included in the reports appear to be mostly related to trespassing at casinos. At least 130 people faced charges like this, of the more than 2,000 total people the office charged during Nessel’s first four years in office.
Michigan Public reached out to the attorney general’s office on multiple occasions to better understand its prosecutions related to trespassing, but did not receive a response.
Reporter Adam Yaha Rayes contributed to this story.
