UW Gaza Protesters Declare Victory After Prosecutors Cut Deal to Dismiss Charges

The 33 defendants arrested during the Students United for Palestinian Equality and Return’s (SUPER) occupation of a UW engineering building over its corporate sponsor and weapons manufacturer Boeing’s ties to the Israeli genocide in Gaza are taking deals that will see charges dropped in a year. After a year and a half of criminal investigation and prosecution, the defendants, a group of mostly UW students known colloquially as the UW 33, hail it as a victory.

“This outcome is a WIN for the UW 33, a win for the Palestine movement, and an important step in the fight against repression,” unspecified members of the UW 33 wrote in a statement sent to The Stranger.

“This outcome is proof of the failure of a coordinated attack between the university, local media, police forces, and federal pressure to prosecute the UW 33 on felony charges,” they wrote.

“Notably, this email itself would likely be used by defense to combat the State’s case,” prosecutors wrote.

UWPD also wrote in their felony probable cause determinations that “there were approximately 75 demonstrators in and around the IEB,” meaning a majority of protesters were never publicly identified or criminally charged—casting more doubt on the police theory that any of the 33 defendants were involved in the sabotage.

Unable to press felony charges for the vandalism of the IEB, prosecutors instead opted to charge all 33 defendants arrested inside with misdemeanor trespass for the crime of a group of mostly students being in a public university building after hours.

Prosecutors also cited a UWPD statement that there were “no eyewitnesses” to the vandalism, meaning that if any of the UW 33 saw who committed the vandalism, they’ve stayed tight-lipped despite the threat of felony prosecution, the long misdemeanor trespass prosecution, and a student conduct code investigation that could have resulted in expulsion.

“I don’t think the KCPAO got anything out of those student conduct hearings. I think that was a tool they were hoping to use to gather more information, but it wasn’t successful,” says Sam Sueoka, a non-student UW 33 defendant who is also an attorney.

“I’m not aware of any attempts or incidents of getting anyone to flip,” he says. 

At the time of publication, 31 defendants have accepted deals with the prosecution that will drop charges in a year, with the remainder set for hearings on the matter soon. The deals, known as stipulated orders of continuance (SOC), see defendants waive their right to a jury trial in exchange for the prosecutor dismissing charges in the future should defendants comply with strict conditions in the meantime. If prosecutors find a defendant has failed to comply with those conditions, they can revoke the SOC, and the defendant gets a bench trial with bad odds.

Sueoka says one of the SOC conditions bars defendants from “assaultive or harassing behavior,” which he calls broad to the point of having a chilling effect on defendants’ free speech.

“If I’m at a protest and I’m yelling at an ICE officer for kidnapping someone, does this violate the SOC?” he says.

Sueoka says the prosecution and SOCs were both attempts to scare and punish people for exercising their right to protest.

“At least in this case, I think it’s just a way to surveil and control 33 people for 12 more months,” he says.

DAMAGES

While it still feels like a victory, even with the restrictions of the SOCs, Sueoka says he and many other UW 33 defendants are still suffering from the physical injuries caused by the police during their arrests last year.

“I had a concussion, they zip-tied my wrists really tight, and I had to go to physical therapy, and I still have a lot of pain and weakness from zip ties, and none of that will be brought up on the record or provided to a jury,” he says.

UW 33 defendant Maddie Keating says she’s still dealing with injuries from her arrest.

“I had a shoulder dislocation from the violent arrest resulting in tendinopathy and bursitis in my right shoulder that I am still in treatment and physical therapy for,” she says. She also experienced multiple joint dislocations, “which caused severe pain,” she says.

“There’s just a lot of unnecessary harm that was done that didn’t need to be done,” says Keating’s attorney Sadé Smith.

“The idea that our government is taking action against young people standing up in a college setting, we know it’s not gonna age well,” she says.

The statement from unspecified UW 33 defendants sent to The Stranger describes further instances of nerve damage, concussions, and joint and tendon injuries resulting from arrests.

“The police officers who did that to us won’t have any form of accountability,” Sueoka says.

Defendant Roberta Collison says she lost her campus job and health insurance after being suspended from UW following the protest, and is being forced to pay tuition for an academic quarter taken from her. “Universities would rather kiss the boot of a fascist than protect their students and their rights,” Collison says.

In addition to their physical scars, defendants have also faced reputational damage that occurred before anyone was officially charged and which will linger long after charges are dropped.

“Our faces and personal information were smeared across the internet by right-wing media outlets, we and our family members were contacted and harassed: some received death threats and one family was conned into paying a phony bail bond,” the UW 33 statement reads.

One defendant, Yasmin Ahmed, was even smeared by far-right “media watchdog” Accuracy in Media (AIM) with a website registered in her name. Citing KOMO-TV coverage, AIM claims Ahmed was “one of 30 pro-Hamas radicals [sic] were arrested at the University of Washington in Seattle after causing nearly $1 million worth of damage to property and sent one university staffer to the hospital,” claims which have never been proved. AIM, which gained recent infamy for driving “doxxing trucks” outside university campuses smearing pro-Palestine students as antisemites, implored visitors to the site to email the UW Board of Regents and King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office to hold the UW 33 “accountable.”

Judge Kuljinder Dhillon, who presided over much of the prosecution, limited media from photographing defendants’ faces at an initial arraignment after attorneys raised issues of safety in the face of requests by KOMO-TV and FOX 13 to film the hearings in full. KOMO and FOX 13 continue to publish the defendants’ arrest mugshots.

“I would point out to the court that with today’s political climate I’m concerned about the safety of these young people. The more images of them are out in the public eye, the more chance someone who might wish them harm might see those images,” an attorney representing defendant Max Rulff said at the arraignment.

Sueoka’s attorney, Michael Schueler, told another judge he “went through a number of different social media posts from right-wing media personalities,” in preparation for the hearing, and that “some of the comments were quite hateful, asking for violence for people, asking the Trump administration to specifically investigate them.”

Defense attorney Edna Enriquez said her client Kimaya Mahajan had even received death threats, which Judge Dhillon cited in her decision to limit filming defendants to the neck down.

While the UW 33 have obtained deals to avoid harsh sentencing, their arrest and public prosecution have still resulted in severe punishment outside the bounds of the legal system for allegations never resulting in conviction.

The University of Washington even got in on the action, smearing SUPER UW as antisemitic in a press release published after the engineering building occupation for their anti-Zionism. A group of over 300 Jewish UW students, staff faculty and alumni had previously denounced then–UW president Ana Mari Cauce and the administration’s false casting of pro-Palestine protesters, including Jewish protesters, as antisemitic to “justify police repression and violence.”

“Calling all protesters antisemitic is dangerous, repressive, and dilutes the meaning of actual antisemitism,” the group wrote.

UW 33 defendants also noted in their statement to The Stranger that their coalition includes Jews, and that “when taking the historical context into account, it must be made clear that Jewish identity is not being questioned in relationship to Palestine—it is the influence and actions of the Zionist settler colony. There are explicit differences between Zionism and Judaism.”

The same day UW smeared their own students as antisemitic for protesting the university’s relationship with a weapons manufacturer arming a genocide, the Trump administration announced a US Department of Education antisemitism investigation into UW, falesly claiming the university had allowed “the ground to grow fertile for anti-Semitism.”

This April, Harmeet Dhillon, the Trump administration’s new far-right head of the US Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, authorized another investigation into UW over an off-campus event hosted by SUPER UW, which the university previously stripped of registration as an official student group. Dhillon is no stranger to accusations of campus antisemitism. While serving as editor of the right-wing student newspaper the Dartmouth Review in 1988, Dhillon defended the decision to publish a column comparing the school’s Jewish president to Hitler and his policies to the Holocaust after the piece was widely denounced as antisemitic.

UW has continued to crack down on pro-Palestinian speakers on campus. In April, Professor Aria Fani was terminated as director of the Middle East Center at the Jackson School of International Studies for criticizing Zionism and the US and Israeli war against Iran. The school is named after Washington’s late US Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, a key figure in providing weapons to Israel during his time in the Senate, where he was nicknamed “the senator from Boeing.”

In August, the university canceled an upcoming Jackson School–sponsored appearance by left-wing anti-Zionist political commentator Hasan Piker—though administrators claim the move had nothing to do with lobbying from two state legislators The Stranger previously revealed accepted all-expenses-paid trips to Israel during the Gaza genocide and pushed legislation that would criminalize protests and suppress university encampments.

SCALE

Given that the UW 33 saga began with threats of felony prosecution and expulsion, and is now set to conclude with misdemeanor charges of being in a public university building after hours being dismissed, it is hard to see what such a large-scale investigation and prosecution accomplished, and why it was ultimately necessary. 

The dozens of cases resulted in hundreds of hearings over the past year and generated thousands of pages of court documents. The majority of defendants were represented by attorneys assigned by the King County Department of Public Defense, which Judge Dhillon said during a hearing was “reaching out to a lot of lawyers in the community to accept these cases.”

When SeaTac tried to prosecute dozens of pro-Palestine protesters in 2024 for blocking the road outside Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, the local court bureaucracy buckled under the strain: Nine of the “SeaTac 46” had their cases dismissed when the court was unable to provide enough public defenders to represent every defendant. The remainder of the defendants eventually took stipulated orders of continuance similar to the UW 33.

While King County ultimately had enough legal resources to scrape together public defenders for every UW 33 defendant who needed one, there were still signs of strain. At least one major scrivener’s error occurred when a defendant who pleaded not guilty at their arraignment was wrongly listed in court records as having instead pled guilty, an error that went unnoticed and uncorrected for nearly a month until The Stranger reached out to King County District Court. 

When King County Prosecuting Attorney Leesa Manion was sworn into office in 2023, she said her office would prioritize violent crime, including cases of gun violence, sexual assault, and repeat property crime, to clear a backlog of thousands of felony cases that piled up during the pandemic.

While the KCPAO spent months working with UWPD to investigate possible felony charges, spokesperson Casey McNerthney says there was “not a material increase to prosecutors’ existing workload” during that time, nor after the misdemeanor cases were filed. McNerthney says that because the office has separate units to prosecute felonies in Superior Court and misdemeanors in District Court, the UW 33 misdemeanor cases didn’t take away resources from felony prosecutions, and the backlog has even been reduced since 2023. 

“People may wonder: Couldn’t the resources devoted to the UW trespass cases have been used more effectively to address felony cases? The resources from those 33 gross misdemeanor cases would not have made a material difference to the caseloads of more complex felony cases—they’re separate units handling separate case types, and those prosecutors (and courtrooms) are not freely interchangeable,” McNerthney told The Stranger by email.

While the KCPAO might not consider the anticlimactic results of the prosecution of the UW 33 to be a misallocation of resources, those on the other side of the courtroom think beating the charges still means something.

“I think it’s a victory for the movement that the state, despite all their resources, could only get an SOC,” Sueoka says. “That’s a huge victory that no one is being sent to jail, and that ultimately, these cases are gonna get dismissed in a year.” 

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