State troopers spray protesters on 22nd Street on April 29 (Photo by Lina Fisher)

At a press conference June 26, County Attorney Delia Garza announced that criminal trespass charges have been dropped for 79 protesters who were arrested during the April 29 pro-Palestine protest on UT-Austin’s campus.

More serious charges, including the misdemeanor assault charge against Fox 7 photojournalist Carlos Sanchez, are still under review.

Garza dropped the initial batch of 57 protest arrests from April 24 due to a lack of probable cause – these 79 had probable cause, but Garza said her office “cannot meet our legal burden to prove the cases beyond a reasonable doubt.” She also emphasized the values of the community: “We have to weigh what arguments defense counsel will make and also what a jury of one’s peers will be weighing. How is this going to be viewed in light of the fact that these students were on a college campus protesting?”

Garza also pointed to limited resources for prosecuting nonviolent crimes, which she flagged in April when the cases came to her office. She said the team of prosecutors who spent around 90 hours reviewing these cases have hundreds of cases on their plates. “Our community has made it clear that they want us to prioritize violent crime. The bulk of our cases are DWIs and assault family violence, indecent assault cases.”

A small group of the 79 arrestees waited outside the Travis County Courthouse to hear Garza’s statements. Kajsa Souls, who was arrested April 29th, said she’s excited charges were dropped for those 79, but that “my heart is heavy for all of the people whose charges weren’t dropped. Because as an arrestee, it feels imperative that we all collectively stand together against state repression. This feels like a way for us to be divided into good protesters and bad protesters, and I think that’s just not the case.”

Garza was quick to absolve individual officers from blame for the arrests, instead pointing the finger at Gov. Greg Abbott and UT leadership: “Freedom of speech – the foundation of it – [means] the government doesn’t stop speech it doesn’t agree with. I hope that our community reflects on the direction we seem to be going in as a state. The decisions that were made in response to these protests show the severe lack of leadership we expect from our elected leaders, as they continue to prioritize extreme government overreach over actual public safety.”