(NewsReady.com) – Columbia University was in chaos at the end of the school year. Protests and an encampment shook the Ivy League school campus. New reports indicate officials are going to let most of the students who were arrested go scot-free.
On April 30, dozens of pro-Palestine protesters occupied Hamilton Hall on the university’s campus. The famed building was the scene of a hostage situation during the 1968 anti-war protests. Nobody was taken hostage this time around, but there was significant property damage. Authorities cleared the building out quickly and arrested 46 people.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has now dropped 31 of the cases against the students. He made the announcement during a court hearing on June 20. Doug Cohen, a spokesperson for the DA, explained that there wasn’t a lot of video footage from the incident, so proving the cases would have been “extremely difficult.”
The DA also decided to dismiss charges against nine of the 22 staff members and students at City College that police arrested on the same nights as the Hamilton Hall incident. In those cases, prosecutors also argued that the charges would be hard to prove because of a lack of evidence.
According to The New York Times, six individuals who were arrested inside the building are facing criminal charges. Five of them were charged with felony second-degree assault. Prosecutors have charged the other person with criminal possession of a weapon, a misdemeanor.
Republicans have repeatedly accused Bragg of being soft on crime. He’s one of the prosecutors who was supported by billionaire George Soros, a major Democratic donor who is trying to reshape the criminal justice system. While he’s going to let students who broke into a building off the hook, he had no qualms about prosecuting former President Donald Trump for altering business records to keep an alleged affair secret. Conservatives have called the prosecution politically motivated.
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