Seven activists, all with Berkeley ties, blocked the span in 2024, protesting genocide in Gaza. Jurors resume deliberations Monday in the nationally watched felony trial.
by Esther Kaplan June 29, 2026 (Berkeleyside.org)
No one really disputes what happened on April 15, 2024, on the Golden Gate Bridge.
A small group of protesters, all with ties to Berkeley, met at the Ashby BART station in the early morning hours and drove to Marin, then onto the bridge, where just before 8 a.m. on a workday, they stopped in the middle of the span. A passenger in each of three cars got out and locked themselves through a tube to their driver. Together, the three cars and three protesters blocked rush hour traffic for four hours, as others hoisted banners and chanted, in what they have described as a desperate gambit to get elected officials to halt U.S. military support for Israel’s war in Gaza.
The war was entering its seventh month, with nearly 34,000 Palestinians dead, and the civil disobedience on the bridge was part of a global day of action timed for Tax Day, dubbed A15.
What a jury will debate in a San Francisco courthouse this week is whether the protesters’ actions constituted a serious crime.
San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins threw the book at them, charging eight participants with felony conspiracy as well as a stack of misdemeanors, from trespass to unlawful assembly to 38 counts of false imprisonment of the commuters whose trips were delayed.
Eighteen others, who Jenkins’ office charged with misdemeanors, later took diversion deals. (A pretrial judge eventually threw out all but five of the false imprisonment charges, Raye Kahn, a spokesperson for the defense team, said, and one of the eight felony defendants saw all of her charges dismissed.)
The charges facing the seven protesters still on trial could carry sentences of up to 15 years.
Tori Porell, a senior attorney with Palestine Legal, a nonprofit firm that defends the free speech rights of those speaking out on Palestine, said she sees the case as “a classic overprosecution of an act of civil disobedience that is meant to stifle dissent and scare people away from speaking out against the US war machine and its role in the Israeli genocide against Palestinians.”
The district attorney’s office declined to comment on this claim or on any aspect of the case, noting that “the jury is deliberating.”
But Jenkins explained her thinking in 2024 when she announced the charges. “While we must protect avenues for free speech, the exercise of free speech cannot compromise public safety,” she said. “Regardless of the message, blocking roadways is not only illegal but also dangerous for protesters, motorists, and first responders.”
The protesters hoped to offer a different explanation of the case to the jury: that the disruption they caused was necessary to prevent a genocide in Gaza. Their attorneys, in opening remarks, said the prosecution would never meet the burden of establishing criminal intent, required for a conspiracy charge, because the protesters were there to save lives.
‘We have the right to take action to save lives’
The trial opened on May 20, before Judge Teresa Caffese, in San Francisco Superior Court, against seven defendants: Sarah Ferrell, Conrad de Jesus, Em Tillotson, and Bhavika Anandpura, all of Oakland, and Rocky Chau, Sara Cantor, and River Allen of Richmond.
All seven have ties to Berkeley. Allen worked at Black Pine Circle School at the time of the protest and Cantor at the East Bay Community Law Center. Tillotson is a former resident who now works at a restaurant in the city, while Chau volunteered at the Berkeley Animal Rights Center for nearly a decade. Ferrell, de Jesus and Anandpura are all UC Berkeley graduates.
Each day at, dozens of supporters filed in, many of them clad in keffiyehs, the Palestinian scarves; some days, parents of the defendants would sit in the gallery. One day, a mother visibly dissolved in tears as her daughter testified.
The prosecution’s case, argued by assistant district attorney Angela Roze, played out over five days, leaning heavily on the testimony of California Highway Patrol officers who arrived to the scene, as well as half a dozen people stuck on the bridge that day, including, according to notes from one trial observer, a nurse who was delayed getting to her job at Kaiser Permanente, a mortgage broker who missed a big sales meeting, and a parent who was stuck in her car with her two young children.
The testimony, at times, did not appear to go as planned. A CHP investigator who examined the protesters’ phones said that he’d found no evidence of communication between them, according to a Bay City News reporter who was present that day, which did little to support the conspiracy charges. A CHP captain testified that he’d never seriously considered opening up an emergency lane, which a bridge official said could have been accomplished by a zipper truck, which moves traffic dividers, in about half an hour.
And one of the trapped drivers — a man who’d been subpoenaed by prosecutors because he’d missed a medical appointment related to the removal of a tumor — unexpectedly broke down on the stand as he spoke about how the Palestinian people had been kicked around for so long, according to two observers.
Caffese ended up dropping this count of false imprisonment because the man said he was able to reschedule his appointment and never felt held against his will.
The defense case relied almost entirely on the testimony of the protesters themselves, who spoke in detail about their motivations. For a conspiracy charge, explained attorney Jeff Wozniak, who was an early member of the defense team, a prosecutor has to prove criminal intent. What the defense was hoping to show, he said, was “they weren’t there to impact the bridge finances or to stop these drivers — they were there to demand attention to the genocide.”
In fact, several defendants, including Ferrell, said they had assumed officials would use the zipper truck to open a fourth lane to let through anyone in need and would not have sought to prevent it; instead, CHP officers halted northbound traffic as well.
When Oakland resident Conrad de Jesus took the stand on May 29, he looked every bit the architect that he is, in close-cropped hair and chunky glasses. Prompted by his defense attorney, Katherine Isa, he walked the jury through his biography — a child of immigrants from the Philippines, his father a Navy man — and his history of involvement in the animal rights movement. It was there, through his involvement in DxE, or Direct Action Everywhere, based in Berkeley, that he first learned about civil disobedience and the idea of the necessity defense, an argument that a defendant acted to prevent significant bodily harm to someone else.
“We believe we have the right to take action to save lives,” he said.
He became emotional as he spoke about the case of Hind Rajab, a 6-year-old girl whose January 2024 call to the Palestine Red Crescent Society after her family’s car was hit by a barrage of bullets had circulated online. “She coughed up blood and was afraid her mother would be angry because she spoiled her dress,” he said. “Ultimately, she was shot and killed by Israeli forces. And that affected me deeply, because I’m a father.”
In the weeks that followed, he said, he saw footage of an apartment building that had been turned to rubble, something he knew, as an architect, would require an extraordinary degree of force. De Jesus recalled seeing a father amid the building’s remains holding the dead body of what appeared to be a 4-year-old girl, and hearing him say, “Habibi,” an Arabic term of endearment that translates to “my darling” or “my love.”
For months, de Jesus said, he had been going to marches; reaching out to his members of Congress; and attending public hearings, including an Oakland City Council meeting where a ceasefire resolution was considered. “I’d done everything I could,” he told the court.
Isa then asked him about his decision to participate in the bridge blockade. “I believed that it was an emergency, that we needed to act very quickly. Just days before, the World Central Kitchen employees were killed by an attack by the Israeli military, so we knew they would stop at nothing,” he said. “We knew Palestinians were being pushed back south to Rafah, and there were plans by the Israeli military to attack Rafah.”
For much of the war, Gazans had been instructed to evacuate from areas in the north that were being heavily bombarded to points south. By the time Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced on April 8 that he had set a date to invade Rafah, the strip’s southernmost city, an estimated 1.5 million people were sheltered there.
Another defendant, the public health worker Sarah Ferrell, was paired with de Jesus that day, and was behind the wheel in one of the vehicles that blocked traffic. She told the court that she had been inundated with images of the destruction in Gaza, and that she had been moving through her days in a state of grief, mourning and outrage. She too had tried everything to persuade Congress to stop arms shipments to Israel: a monthslong postcard campaign, daily calls to her senators, protest marches, testimony before the Oakland City Council.
“The executive branch was completely failing us,” Ferrell said. “The legislative branch was failing us. Civil society was failing us. There were no avenues left to stop the U.S. from sending the supplies to support the invasion of Rafah.”
The bridge action, she said, was a chance to be seen, to say, “You can’t ignore us anymore.”
While she and de Jesus were locked together, she recalled noticing at one point that he was crying. She said she looked out over the water, imagining Gaza far on the other side, and thought to herself, “We hear you. I’m so sorry.” And then, as the daughter of a minister, she prayed.
Prosecutors sought to document the disruption’s harm
From the start, San Francisco’s district attorney seemed determined to prosecute the case aggressively. The day after the action, Jenkins held a press conference announcing that she would bring felony conspiracy charges. At that event, and then on social media, she called for “anyone who was falsely imprisoned on the Golden Gate Bridge” to come forward, saying they may be entitled to restitution. The California Highway Patrol also issued a callout for anyone stuck on the bridge that day.
“There are people that were inconvenienced by this protest and that’s been true of every protest going back to the Edmund Pettis Bridge,” said Wozniak, who has defended Bay Area protesters facing criminal charges over many years. “But soliciting people to come forward who were impacted by a protest, with the promise of monetary payment under the restitution laws, is something I’ve never seen before.”
When Jenkins’ office filed charges against 26 of the protesters that August, the affidavit described numerous drivers who missed work, medical appointments, and flights, including the man who’d missed his pre-op appointment, and two others who said they had to relieve themselves in their car. The DA also sought $162,554 in restitution to the Golden Gate Bridge District for lost toll revenue. Though the bridge district later dropped the restitution claim, it was cited by a judge in November as the reason he denied a motion to downgrade the felony charges.
“The April 15, 2024, protest was unprecedented in its duration. Protesters blocked all southbound traffic on the Golden Gate Bridge for over four hours,” bridge district spokesperson Paolo Cosulich-Schwartz said when asked if the district had ever previously filed a restitution claim over a protest. “The Bridge District has not previously sought restitution for other protest incidents because they were resolved quickly at the direction of law enforcement.”
The felony charges brought by Jenkins’ office were unusual for an act of protest in San Francisco — and stood out among the many disruptive protests that took place on A15. Protesters in Eugene, Oregon, for example, who blocked the I-5 that day, got charged with misdemeanor disorderly conduct. Chicago activists who blocked access to O’Hare Airport faced misdemeanor charges for obstructing traffic. And protesters who blocked a bridge on the I-84 in Beacon, N.Y., in the Hudson Valley, faced misdemeanor charges of trespassing and disorderly conduct.
Historically, participants in other Golden Gate Bridge protests that halted traffic have faced lesser charges as well. A famous AIDS protest in 1989, which blocked traffic for nearly an hour, and a “Save the Redwoods” protest in 1996, which press reports said caused an “all-day traffic snarl,” each resulted only in misdemeanor charges. A Black Lives Matter march that clogged bridge traffic in the summer of 2020 didn’t even result in arrests.
And in the wake of a protest on the Bay Bridge in November 2023, just five months before the A15 action, which shut down traffic for the same window of time, four hours, Jenkins’ office filed only misdemeanor charges — all of which were ultimately dismissed in exchange for community service.
“Jenkins has taken a much more draconian approach to charging across the board,” Wozniak, who was a defense attorney in that case, said. “But it’s also clear that she didn’t like the press that the Bay Bridge case brought,” when the protesters didn’t get jail time.
The defense team accuses Jenkins of bias
In an Aug. 20 letter, attorneys for the 26 original defendants requested that Jenkins recuse herself from the case, claiming that she had overcharged the protesters due to a “bias against Palestinians.” She had at least two meetings with the Israeli Consulate in 2023, they wrote, and had received gifts of wine from the consulate. The attorneys cited a remark she made in October 2023, calling an antiwar protest “pro-Hamas,” and emails from one of her assistant DAs, reported by the SF Standard, calling Palestinians “brutal Arab invaders” and “Nazis.”
The DA’s office said at the time that the ADA’s remarks “do not reflect the views of the District Attorney or the District Attorney’s Office,” and that the matter was under review. And the office dismissed the concerns raised in the lawyers’ letter, issuing statements to the press saying that meeting with consular staff was a routine part of the job for elected officials.
Yet those concerns were amplified as the case advanced and Jenkins’ office filed a pretrial motion asking a judge to bar the word “genocide” from being mentioned during trial.
It was a tactic that had been used in another high-profile Bay Area case against pro-Palestine protesters, this one over an office occupation at Stanford University in June 2024, part of a student-led campaign to get the university to divest from companies implicated in the Israeli offensive in Gaza. In that case, Santa Clara District Attorney Jeff Rosen, who charged a dozen protesters with felony vandalism and conspiracy charges, also sought to disallow the defense from introducing evidence of the protesters’ political motivations. A judge denied both motions last December, then recused Rosen and his office in May after the defense discovered that he’d mischaracterized the case as a fight against anti-Semitism in a fundraising appeal for his reelection campaign.
“Trying to keep out the word genocide is wanting the case to be content neutral,” said Tony Brass, a lawyer who represented one of the Stanford defendants, Hunter Taylor-Black. “There’s an argument here that you’re fighting for the greater good, that it’s a legal necessity — everything else I’m doing isn’t landing, isn’t saving lives, and I might be able to save lives if I do this.”
“Do we have a right to know what was in their mind when they did it?” he said. “If you strip out the meaning and necessity of what people are doing, they just look like a bunch of lunatics.”
A judge rejected a pretrial defense motion to recuse Jenkins from the Golden Gate Bridge case, and Caffese later rejected the prosecution’s motion to disallow the word “genocide” in court.
Still, Roze, the prosecutor, interjected repeatedly during the defendants’ testimony, asking Caffese to admonish the jury that the protesters were not testifying as experts on Gaza. The judge did so often, instructing the jury several times that when the protesters spoke about the destruction they had seen and read about in the news, it was evidence only of their own state of mind.
The jury will consider narrow questions of intent
On the morning of June 5, the day closing arguments were set to begin, the defendants and their supporters gathered on an expanse of lawn on McAllister Street, opposite the courthouse. De Jesus wore a dark brown suit and tie, a black keffiyeh around his neck. Ferrell wore a white jacket with a white and green keffiyeh, a bouquet of irises and dahlias in her hands. They held one side of a Palestinian flag; Allen held the other. None of the defendants offered remarks, on the advice of their attorneys, but several of their supporters did.
One of them was Taylor-Black, the Stanford defendant, who was free to speak because, several months after she graduated, her case ended in a mistrial. “I’ve honestly recently been thinking a lot about the term complicity,” she said. “They sought to ban the use of the word genocide. The reason they do this is because they know that the actions taken on that bridge on April 14 and on Stanford University’s campus on June 5 are not crimes. We are not the ones who have made ourselves complicit in genocide in our time.”
After the defendants filed through the metal detectors and into the upstairs courtroom, Caffese began her instructions to the jury, which took the better part of an hour. She never said the words the seven defendants, their families, and their attorneys were waiting for: She did not instruct the jury to consider a necessity defense, even though a California appellate court had recently allowed it in an unrelated case about an animal rights protest. That means that the jury isn’t supposed to consider the question of whether trying to halt a genocide justified the protesters’ actions.
Or at least, as Brass, Taylor-Black’s attorney, explained, the jurors are technically not supposed to. Still, he said, the defendants’ sense of urgency about trying to stop genocide might make jurors hesitate to convict, which might motivate them to look at all of the elements of the case with greater scrutiny.
Just as prosecutors have discretion over what charges to bring, jurors bring their own judgment when deciding verdicts. Nearly three years since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack and Israel’s invasion of Gaza, U.S. public opinion has shifted dramatically, with many more Americans now sympathizing with Palestinians over Israelis, and a third believing that the U.S. provides Israel with too much military assistance.
There is another affirmative defense, known as a “mistake of law,” that was a throughline in the defense testimony. In a felony conspiracy charge, as Kahn explained, one of the key elements is intent — in this case, the intent to commit several alleged misdemeanor crimes, from trespass to false imprisonment. With this defense, what would matter is that the protesters thought their actions were legal, because they were justified, even if they didn’t properly understand the law. Caffese didn’t instruct the jury to consider that defense either.
“The defendants thought it was necessary to block traffic on that bridge to prevent a greater harm from happening, even if they were mistaken,” Kahn said.
“What was their intent that day? They were heartbroken. They wanted to do everything in their power to stop these atrocities.”
Berkeleyside staff contributed reporting to this story.
