Five of the 13 pro-Palestinian protesters detained by Cornell University Police Department officers during the Pathways to Peace walkout have denied offers for their cases to be dismissed during a hearing in Ithaca City Court on Wednesday.
Case dismissal is based on the condition that defendants would not be arrested again prior to the end of a probationary period set by the prosecution. Those who accepted the dismissal deal will not have a criminal record, while those who did not accept will have to reappear in court for further hearings that could result in trial and conviction.
The 13 defendants — made up of Cornell staff, students, alumni and Ithaca locals — were arrested and charged with disorderly conduct after staging a walkout protest of the Pathways to Peace panel on March 10. The panel featured a discussion between four speakers about the war in Gaza.
The walkout was organized by Students for Justice in Palestine, a student organization that has since been suspended. Protesters argued that the panel was unbalanced in favor of Israeli voices. SJP additionally denounced one of the panelists, Tzipi Livni, the former vice prime minister and former foreign minister of Israel, who faced war crime allegations and warrants for her arrests from the UK in 2009 based on her decisions made before and during an Israeli offensive in Palestine.
Those who rejected the dismissal deal intend to continue to fight the case.
“We are prepared to fight this with every constitutional tool we have available,” Defense Attorney Sujata Gibson said. “We can’t let this keep happening because it is chilling speech. People have to be able to react.”
The probationary time frame for the proposed adjournments in contemplation of dismissals varied between defendants — a move that was criticized by Gibson after the hearing. According to Gibson, ACD deals are typically contingent on defendants not being arrested or involved with criminal activity for six-month periods. However, last year’s Day Hall protesters were offered “semester ACDs,” which reduced that time frame to one month, the remainder of the 2024 spring semester.
This time, only some of the students were offered semester-long ACDs, which would end on May 17, while community members were offered the standard six-month deal. Two students received and accepted the six-month deal.
District Attorney Matthew Van Houten wrote in an email to The Sun that the decisions to pursue different ACD offers were based on “careful consideration to the individual circumstances of each person’s conduct.”
Daniel Creamer, an Ithaca local who was one of the first people arrested at the panel, denied the six-month ACD he was offered. In an interview with The Sun, he called the decisions between varying lengths of time for the ACDs “arbitrary” and “ridiculous.” Additionally, he said the conditions of the ACD deal could make defendants hesitant to attend protests during the probationary period.
“That’s six months where you aren’t really supposed to be at protests in case something were to happen,” Creamer said. “I want to fight for what I’m doing.”
Karuna Prasad ’25 and Adriana Vink ’27 both accepted their six-month ACD offers. Vink told The Sun that she thought it was best not to have legal charges over her head.
“Cornell knows that they can hold these things over you and that they can instill fear in you that way,” Vink said. According to Vink, her attorney, Tasha Kates, spoke to the prosecution and attempted to change the offer to a May 17 end date before and during the hearing. Both attempts were denied.
Charges against Barbara Taam ’74, Milton Taam ’73 and Emily Vo ’25, all represented by Gibson, were dismissed.
Second hearings for those who did not accept their ACDs have not yet been scheduled.
Gibson and several defendants, including Delphi Lyra ’28, Timo Isreb ’26, Creamer and Milton Taam, spoke outside the court about the effects of arrests on free speech on campus.
In their speech, Isreb mentioned the Trump administration’s Tuesday decision to freeze more than $1 billion dollars in federal funding to Cornell. According to Isreb, the freeze occurred despite University administrators’ attempts to “satisfy their donors, Congress and the Trump administration.”
“As we saw yesterday, no amount of capitulation can fund an institution that is morally bankrupt,” Isreb said.
Lyra reminded the crowd of the effects of the war in Gaza — including the death toll — and the purpose behind campus protests.
“They can bar us from campus, they can throw us in the courtrooms, and they can try their very hardest to make us afraid,” Lyra said. “ [But] for every moment of the Israeli occupation, it will never work.”
