In May 2024, 17 Notre Dame students were arrested and charged with misdemeanor trespassing following a pro-Palestine protest. Nearly 18 months later, all the students have completed pretrial diversion stipulations.
Pretrial diversion is an option for nonviolent, first-time offenders who agree to complete specific requirements in exchange for having criminal charges dropped. According to Ariel Thelander, a graduate student who was arrested, the requirements in this case included paying court fines and agreeing to refrain from criminal activity for a year.
Background information
On May 2, 2024, protestors gathered on a grass lawn near Hammes Bookstore to read a letter addressed to then University President Fr. John Jenkins. According to The Observer, the letter articulated three demands: divestment from the University’s investments in military contractor companies, a reevaluation of the University’s ties with Israeli universities and the dismantlement of the 15-minute rule, a Vietnam War-era policy which manages protests on campus and requires prior approval from the University administration.
Under the 15 minute rule, students can face disciplinary consequences after 15 minutes of an unregistered demonstration.
“It wasn't supposed to be a protest or even a demonstration. It was just supposed to be a gathering of students who were dedicated to talking about Palestine. That is what we did for the majority of our events,” Connor Marrott, who was arrested during the protests, said. (Editor’s note: Marrott is a former columnist for The Observer)
Atalia Omer, professor of religion, conflict and peace studies believes students saw the demonstration as a way to put ethics into practice.
“They wanted to be heard by the administrators. In the classroom, we are taught to do the right thing, to put into action what they are learning in terms of ethic — in terms of ethical commitment to the most vulnerable — and they felt very strongly a sense of urgency that they could not continue business as normal so they wanted to go out and say, ‘this is not consistent with my understanding of Catholic values and the values that University is saying we have to inhabit in a part of our formation as citizens,’” she said.
Prior to the demonstration, Marrott and another student were assigned the role of police liaisons. According to Marrott, police monitored the protest with drones and undercover cars positioned near the lawn.
“I don't think it's any coincidence that the gathering was a group of people who were majority people of color. We had many women in our group wearing hijabs, and so it just felt like very immediate and very targeted and very intentional that the police were there, almost immediately at the start of our gathering,” Marrott said.
Later in the evening, protestors moved the demonstration to the center of campus outside of the Main Building. By this time, police had warned students that they would need to disperse or risk arrest, but Thelander said students were unsure if police would follow through with these threats. Leaders of the student group advised those unwilling to risk arrest to disperse. Provost John McGreevy and former dean of the Keough School of Global Affairs Scott Appleby arrived nearly an hour later to meet with students.
Francesca Freeman, one of the protestors who was not arrested, said the group was disappointed in the lack of action from McGreevy and Appleby. “We of course knew that we wouldn’t get everything we wanted in one night, but we wanted a commitment from the University to seriously engage with us. While University leaders, including provost McGreevy and dean Appleby met with us, they refused to engage with us in any meaningful way and refused to agree to a second meeting, a request that they laughed off,” Freeman said.
McGreevy and the University declined to comment on this story. Notre Dame Police Department, Appleby, Student Voices for Palestine and the Muslim Student Association did not respond to requests for comment.
The arrests
In response to what some protestors felt was a disappointing response from the University, the students escalated their demonstrations, linking arms in a circle on God Quad and chanting. Before doing this, protestors were warned multiple times that they would be arrested if they continued in their unauthorized protest.
The students in the circle were then arrested, including one person filming the protests, and taken to on-campus holding cells.
“They segregated people by sex and eventually chose to transport us to the St. Joseph County jail. Booking someone at a county jail requires charging them for a crime, so they were holding us for a while until they figured out what they were going to charge us with,” Thelander said.
All 17 students were charged with misdemeanor trespassing. Three students were additionally charged with resisting arrest.
Marrott recounted how the protestors responded to the arrests.
“One of the things we had planned for is, if anyone gets arrested or if anyone gets in trouble, we have to start a phone banking campaign. So what we did is, when we got arrested, we had a team back at the school that was running a social media campaign that was alerting the press, and one of the things they did was they told people to call the jail,” he said.
In the three hours they were in jail, protestors said the phone rang continuously.
The pretrial diversion process
After the students were released, the University declined to drop the charges. Lawyers representing the students submitted a motion to dismiss, which was rejected both initially and upon appeal.
After delayed hearings, students were able to choose between pretrial diversion or trial. All 17 students chose the former option.
Although some students felt they would have had a strong case at trial, the costs of litigation dissuaded them from pursuing that option. “There is an argument to be made that had we gone to trial, we had a contractual interest in the property, which is one of the determining factors in misdemeanor trespassing. Particularly the graduate students, who, in the course of our normal duties would have access to that area of campus and are being paid by the University … For all of us, going to trial would have been personally very expensive in time and in money that a lot of us do not have,” Thelander said.
Marrott expressed concern that several of the students charged were international students using visas and green cards who he feared could be targeted more than other student protestors.
Internal consequences
According to Omer, arrested students were summoned to a disciplinary board within the University. Omer said she was invited to the hearings twice to provide emotional support to the students arrested.
Omer noted that nothing tangible came of the board hearing, although students were asked what they learned from these experiences. She explained the students felt justified in their positions and actions.
Reflections on the arrests
Reflecting on the arrests and subsequent pretrial diversion, professor Ricky Herbst of the Department of Film, Television and Theatre felt it was unfair that students “carri[ed] the weight of a movement for a campus and for a community.”
“I spend a lot of days wondering, should I have been arrested with them?... It felt unfair that no one older stepped up and said, ‘You know, I will be with you. I will walk with you. I will be beside you,’” Herbst said.
Herbst also worried the arrests might deter students from protesting in the future. “When you have moments where it becomes something that the internet is able to archive, like arrests, like a story, people are going to start avoiding those things because they know they do not want their name forever tied to this for the rest of our lives,” he said.
Thelander explained, had the arrests happened today, she might have opted for trial instead of pretrial diversion “on principle just because I do not think that the arrests were fair.”
For Marrott, the arrest is a source of pride. “I think my arrest represents something that’s contradictory to that piece of Notre Dame’s identity, but I think now having graduated and having a job and being a little bit more secure, I guess, in my future, I wear it as a badge of honor,” he said.
He also expressed his surprise and disappointment in the University’s response. “I never expected Notre Dame to be so complicit in a nationwide trend of silencing Palestinian protesters,” he said. “One, because I thought Notre Dame would want to stick up for people in Palestine. But two, because Notre Dame prides itself on being different, on being more respectful of students’ rights and students’ intellectual freedom,” he said.
Editor’s note: a previous version of this story said Francesca Freeman had been arrested during the protests. Freeman was present at the protests but was not arrested. The Observer apologizes for this error.
