A civil rights attorney wants Denver’s city attorney to drop the prosecution against pro-Palestinian students who pitched tents to press for “divestment” against Israeli companies and caused hundreds of thousands in damages and cancelled events on the Auraria Campus last spring. 

Attorney Andy McNulty said Monday about 20 students are being prosecuted for trespassing and failure to obey a lawful order. If convicted, the protesters, which included students and nonstudents, could receive up to 300 days in jail or a $999 fine — or both.

“I hope that the city will drop the charges against these students, who were just out there executing their right to free speech,” McNulty said. “That should be intolerable for a society that values free speech.”

At the peak of the protest action, campus authorities said the activists destroyed the sod in the quad, engaged in graffiti tagging and vandalism, occupied and trashed an office, and set up tents inside the Tivoli Student Union building. School Authorities also said they paid for a hazmat team to handle a spill from an illegal toilet.

The protests at the Auraria Campus and elsewhere set off a fierce debate over the parameters for free speech, drew allegations of antisemitism and put a spotlight on university officials, who struggled with the tension between upholding their declared ideals of free speech and maintaining campus security.  

Melissa Sisneros, a City Attorney’s office spokesperson, did not respond to an email and phone seeking comment.

McNulty is representing at least three protesters.

He was joined Monday in front of Lindsey-Flannigan Courthouse in Denver by about half a dozen students involved in the protest last Spring.

Students had demanded then — and again on Monday — that administrators “divest” from corporations that operate in Israel.

Layne Hellman, a University of Colorado Denver senior student, claimed that universities have profited from military contracts without student input.

“We don’t want our education funded by war,” said Hellman, 22.

Hellman and others also decried the university decision to hold disciplinary hearings to suspend and place students on probation, as well as revoke student groups that supported the pro-Palestinian protests.

“Make no mistake, the discipline hearings are justifying the schools actions as a tool of repression,” Hellman said.

Some 3,200 people across the United States were arrested in the spring during a wave of pro-Palestinian tent encampments that sprouted up on campuses, including at Auraria and the University of Denver.

Some college administrators ended the demonstrations by striking deals with the students — or by simply waiting them out — while others called in police to physically remove protesters who refused to leave.

In the vast majority of the cases — which included students, faculty those without ties to the colleges — protesters faced misdemeanors or lower-level charges, such as trespassing, failure to disperse, disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. Many of these have since been dropped.

Colleen Walker, the executive director of the Auraria Higher Education Center, earlier told The Denver Gazette that the campus will pursue charges of trespassing and assault against activists.

“So, if you are arrested because you have broken a law and you have ignored the policy and you have ignored the conduct code, that doesn’t bode well,” Walker said.

A wave of pro-Palestinian rallies on college campuses and clashes with police had already grabbed national headlines before the first tents were erected in Denver on the Auraria campus in April.

The protests emerged in response to the civilian Palestinian deaths at the hands of Israeli forces following the unprovoked attack on Oct. 7 by Hamas — an Islamist group labeled a terrorist organization by several countries, including the U.S. That day, the group killed 1,200 people in Israeli and kidnapped more than 200 people, some of whom remained in captivity today. 

More than 200 protesters — many of them students — occupied the Auraria campus for weeks. They demanded, among other things, that university officials stopped investing in corporations that operate in Israel.

Denver and campus police officers dismantled the encampment a day after it was erected in April, arresting more than 40 activists.

The tents reemerged in no time on Auraria and then later at the University of Denver.

Pro-Palestinian activists have repeated the same human rights themes and have relied on similar tactics and strategies used by students in the 1960s. There are differences. Notably, the protests today have taken an explicitly racial undertone, which many Jewish students regarded as suffused with antisemitism.

At the University of Denver, officials said they saw instances of antisemitism from the pro-Palestinian encampment.

In the days after Hamas stormed the open-air Nova Musical Festival in Israel’s Negev Desert about three miles from the Gaza border, pro-Palestinian protesters took white chalk to the side walk and brick walls of the Golda Meir House Museum & Education Center on the Auraria Campus.

Vandals wrote, referring to Golda Meir — one of the signatories of Israel’s Declaration of Independence in 1948 and Israel’s fourth prime minister — “Get this racist Zionist off our campus” and “Tear this down.”

McNulty represented seven protesters injured by police officers during the local George Floyd protests in 2020, who settled with the city of Denver for $1.6 million. Protests erupted nationwide in the wake of a Minneapolis police officer pressing his knee on the neck of Floyd, a Black man, for nearly 10 minutes, a killing him.

In Denver, protesters encountered police with tear gas, sponge rounds and pepperballs that led to multiple lawsuits against the city for the department’s use of force. So far, these cases have led to millions of dollars in settlements.

University also faced pressure from Jewish students. 

In May, Sara Rones, a 19-year-old Jewish Metropolitan State University of Denver, student filed a notice with the Auraria Higher Education Center, alleging she and others had faced harassment and defamation on campus in the days after the Hamas attack on Israel.

The Colorado Governmental Immunity Act l protects public agencies, and the individuals who run these entities, from unlimited liability. Under the law, the default is that public entities enjoy immunity from liability — but that immunity is waived for damages or injuries arising out of wrongful actions in specific contexts.

Notice is required before pursuing a lawsuit.

Located in downtown Denver, the Auraria Campus is shared by the Community College of Denver, MSU and CU.