In response to legal issues and controversy surrounding the US case, which she described as a “lightning rod of contention,” Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel announced that she has dropped charges against seven University of Michigan students protesters.
The case, which reportedly began in May 2024, is over, with the decision on Monday putting an end to it. The students, who entered not guilty, were accused of trespassing and resisting a police officer while protesting for Palestinians on a campus.  ,
The student defense team’s member, Jamil Khuja, said, “We feel vindicated that the case was dismissed. “These people have no criminal history,” they say. They were using public property to speak out against their political beliefs.
Nessel defended her decision to file felony charges against the students on Monday, saying “a reasonable jury would find the defendants guilty of the crimes alleged” despite dropping the charges and receiving more and more negative feedback about the case.
Nessel continued, however, in a statement that she had dropped the charges because she did not consider “these cases to be a wise use of my department’s resources.”
Most of the students who were detained right away after Israel’s occupation of Gaza were swept across the country last year during the wave of pro-Palestine campus encampments that swept the country.
Palestinian rights advocates claimed that the Nessel case was an attack on the right to free speech and assembly, and that the case in Michigan became a symbol of the country’s crackdown on pro-Palestine demonstrations.
In response to allegations of bias, the attorney general dismissed the allegations as “baseless and absurd,” the accused’s defense attorneys had filed motions for Nessel to recuse herself from the case.
The attorney general stated in her statement that “these distractions and ongoing delays have given these proceedings a circus-like atmosphere.”
The defense attorney, Khuja, criticized Nessel’s claim that the pretrial proceedings were “circus-like” as untrue, and that the team was “absolutely confident” that the case would succeed, either by judicial dismissal or not-guilty jury verdict.
According to Michigan’s prosecution rules, he claimed it was appropriate to request Nessel’s removal from the case. He further stated that the county should have brought the charges and not the state’s attorney general.
Free speech is being attacked.
The defense lawyer also pointed out that Nessel and Rashida Tlaib, the “only Palestinian in Congress,” clashed weeks prior to the charges for defending the chant “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” which has been used by student protesters, to underline the alleged bias.
Soon after Nessel’s arrest of the students, Tlaib pointed out that there were no other protest movements in the country that faced a similar legal crackdown.
The attorney general responded by blaming Tlaib for being anti-Semitic, despite the congresswoman’s lack of mention of the attorney general’s Jewish or religion.
Rashida should not make it clear that the Attorney General’s position in my religion is unfair. In a social media post from September, Nessel remarked, “It’s wrong and anti-Semitic.”
Nessel’s anti-Semitism accusations against Tlaib were repeated repeatedly by CNN and pro-Israel outlets over the course of weeks.
According to Khuja, the attorney general ultimately hoped to “create a role model for those who are protesting for Palestine.”
He added that the issue spanned more than the involved politicians and students.
The First Amendment applies to all speech, but it has recently been attacked in an effort to discredit Israel, according to Khuja.
Source: Aljazeera
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