Five Stanford University students are facing trial beginning on Monday over felony charges stemming from a pro-Palestinian protest on campus – the most severe criminal case brought against some of the thousands of students who staged nationwide protests and encampments against Israel’s war in Gaza.
The northern California students are part of a group of 12 who were charged with felony conspiracy to trespass and felony vandalism in connection to an hour-long, June 2024 occupation during which the group barricaded themselves inside the university president’s office to demand Stanford consider a student resolution to divest from Israel, among other requests.
On the heels of similar actions at other universities across the US, the students in question unofficially renamed the building after Adnan al-Bursh, a Palestinian surgeon who was reportedly tortured to death while in Israeli detention.
The university suspended the students immediately after their arrest and banned them from campus for two terms, until the conclusion of an internal disciplinary process which found they had violated university policy, but allowed them back on campus that fall.
Then in April 2025, nearly a year after the protest amid a wave of elite US universities facing funding cuts from the Trump administration over allegations of not cracking down on antisemitism on campus, Jeff Rosen, the Santa Clara county district attorney, announced criminal charges against the group.
At a press conference, Rosen declared “dissent is American, vandalism is criminal”, adding: “What the defendants chanted as they went about those plans is legally irrelevant … Pouring invective on to social media is not against the law; pouring fake blood all over someone else’s workplace is.”
A spokesperson for Stanford referred questions about the trial to Rosen’s office. “We believe the decision on how to proceed with the criminal cases rests with the Santa Clara county district attorney’s office based on the evidence gathered,” the spokesperson said. “We respect their decisions in this matter.”
Rosen’s office declined to comment on the timing of the charges and their unique severity. “As we continue with this trial, we are solely concerned with and focused on the criminal allegations faced by the defendants,” a spokesperson for the office said. “It would be both unethical and unfair for us to try to prosecute our case through your story.”
One of the students initially charged agreed to cooperate with prosecutors and was not indicted, while several others accepted pre-trial plea deals or other diversion offers.
The five who are proceeding to trial at the Santa Clara county superior court in San Jose have pleaded not guilty are pressing on in an effort to keep the focus on Palestinians and what they view as “Stanford’s complicity with Israel’s genocide”, two of them said in an interview with the Guardian.
“It is ridiculous for me or for any of us co-defendants to be accused of property damage,” said German Gonzalez, who was a sophomore at Stanford at the time of the protest. “This is all just a distraction from the very real property destruction and crimes that are occurring in Gaza every day because of Stanford University’s investments and actions.”
Another of the defendants also talked of priorities.
“If we are to talk about property destruction at all, it’s the completely destroyed landscape of Gaza that Stanford University is liable for, and not the fact that an office at a multi-billion dollar institution was damaged,” defendant Amy Zhai said.
Thousands of students were arrested over their involvement in campus protests that spread across the country in the spring of 2024, and dozens were suspended or expelled from their universities.
But most of those who also faced criminal charges have seen those charges dropped. In New York, prosecutors declined to pursue charges against dozens of students who had occupied a campus building in April 2024 and unofficially renamed it after Hind Rajab, a six-year-old girl killed by Israeli forces as she cried for help.
In Michigan, the attorney general, Dana Nessel, dropped charges against seven protesters arrested at a University of Michigan encampment. The Guardian had detailed her extensive links to university regents calling for prosecution.
And prosecutors in Los Angeles declined to pursue charges against the majority of students arrested in connection to protests at two different universities there.
The Stanford group are among the first to face trial – and the only ones to be charged with felonies, a harsher crime than the misdemeanors protesters are typically accused of.
If convicted, they face the possibility of more than three years in prison. The university is also seeking hundreds of thousands of dollars in restitution over what it claims was damage sustained by the building during the protest – claims the students say are “completely overinflated”. During the press conference announcing the charges, Rosen displayed images of fake blood splattered on documents, a broken door frame, and a damaged office. The university’s facilities director testified that the damage amounted to just under $10,000, according to the Stanford Daily, the school’s newspaper.
The students argued that they had already been punished when the university suspended them from campus “faster than it suspended Brock Turner”, said Gonzalez, in reference to a Stanford student convicted of sexual assault in 2016.
Gonzalez and others were left sleeping in cars or on friends’ couches, he said, as the university sought restitution – $329,000 in total from the group – that was “10 times” his family’s annual income. He called the continued prosecution, and the harshness of it, politically motivated and “cruel”, and questioned Rosen’s motives, pointing to a September 2023 visit to the Bay Area by Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, during which Rosen greeted him on the airport tarmac.
“It’s meant as a deterrent for future protesters,” Gonzalez said of the prosecution. “To say that if you decide to stand up against genocide, apartheid, illegal occupation, and continued violations of international law, then you will be punished, and you will be punished as severely as you possibly can.”
Zhai, the other defendant, added that the chilling effect of the charges has already been felt on campus, with pro-Palestinian students afraid to voice their opinions in class. Still, those heading to court hope the trial, which is expected to last five weeks, will be an opportunity to discuss their ongoing criticism of Stanford – including its partnership with US weapons manufacturer Lockheed Martin.
In pre-trial motions, the prosecution sought to ban the students from discussing “genocide”, as well as the political motivations behind the protest and free speech issues – a request the court denied.
“The defense strategy is to use this jury trial as a forum to put Israel and Stanford University on trial for the Gaza War,” prosecutors wrote in court filings. “The court should not allow this case to become a sideshow on the morality of armed conflict abroad.”
But prosecutors successfully blocked the defendants’ efforts to have an international human rights expert testify, and from invoking the first amendment as a defense, on the grounds that the alleged conduct does not constitute protected speech.
“Our case is just one of many examples of what people have already called the Palestine effect,” said Gonzalez. “One of many examples of the system being stretched to its absolute limit to ensure that we receive the harshest punishment not for what we’ve done, but for what we think.”
