Prosecutor removed after using case to fundraise re-election
The five students had been among a group of 12 who barricaded themselves inside the office of the university’s president during a one-hour occupation in June 2024, renaming the building after Adnan al-Bursh, a Palestinian surgeon who was reportedly tortured to death while in Israeli detention. The group had pressed Stanford to consider a student resolution calling for divestment from Israel, among other demands. All 12 were charged with felony conspiracy to trespass and felony vandalism; prosecutors initially threatened roughly $1 million in restitution, and each defendant risked being found liable for $329,000 at trial.
Some of the 12 accepted plea deals or other diversion offers. Five went to trial earlier in 2026 in a proceeding that lasted about a month and ended in a hung jury. Rosen immediately announced his intention to retry the case, but a judge ordered his recusal in May after finding a conflict of interest that, the judge said during court proceedings, “render it unlikely that the defendants will receive fair treatment.”
The students’ legal team had submitted evidence that Rosen had used the pending case to fundraise for his re-election, citing it on a webpage that showcased his work to fight “antisemitism.” The page was emailed to a listserv of more than 600 people soliciting donations. Rosen responded to the recusal effort by accusing the students’ defense attorney of engaging in a “f—— antisemitic trope” in an interview with a local publication.
After Rosen’s removal, the California attorney general’s office took over the prosecution and reached Monday’s resolution. In addition to dropping all charges against the five who went to trial, the agreement requires 100 hours of community service at a nonprofit of each student’s choosing and approximately $50,000 in total restitution — far less than what prosecutors initially sought. Three additional students who previously accepted misdemeanor plea deals will have their convictions withdrawn once they complete the required community service.
A spokesperson for Rosen referred questions about the case to the California attorney general’s office. The attorney general’s office and Stanford University did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The Stanford prosecution was the most severe criminal case brought against students in connection with the wave of pro-Palestinian campus protests that swept US universities in the spring of 2024. Thousands of students were arrested during that period, dozens were suspended or expelled from their universities, and most of those who also faced criminal charges have since seen those charges dropped.
Two of the five defendants who went to trial, German Gonzalez and Amy Zhai, spoke of their relief in exclusive interviews with the Guardian. Zhai, who graduated from Stanford as the trial got under way and is now in law school at a different university, framed the outcome as a defeat for the prosecution’s stated aim.
“The most significant part of this is that I can continue to be involved in the Palestine movement in ways that were kind of curtailed by also being actively a defendant in a criminal case,” Zhai said. “[The prosecution] was intended to silence speech about Palestine, and for everything that they threw at this case, they have failed.”
Zhai added that she saw the resolution as encouragement for other students who remain afraid to act on their beliefs. “People still very much care about Palestine but I think they are afraid, and reasonably so, because of everything that’s happened with the escalation of repression over the past two years,” she said. “It takes victories like this one to encourage people to turn their beliefs into action.”
Abbee Cox, a member of the students’ legal team, said Monday’s resolution aligned with how Stanford has historically handled peaceful student protesters. “The attorney general’s office has addressed this in a manner consistent with the way other peaceful student protesters at Stanford have been treated over the years — protesters against apartheid, against the Vietnam War,” she said. “But it took almost two and a half years of this painful and protracted and incredibly stressful battle to get there. And it took a fair prosecutor to get us there in the end.”
In pre-trial motions, Rosen had sought to bar the defendants from discussing “genocide,” the political motivations behind the protest, and free-speech issues — a request the court denied. He had also successfully blocked the defendants’ effort to have an international human rights expert testify and from invoking the First Amendment as a defense, on the grounds that the alleged conduct did not constitute protected speech.
Rosen announced the criminal charges against the group in April 2025 at a press conference where he declared, “dissent is American, vandalism is criminal.” The students had been immediately arrested after the June 2024 occupation, suspended, and banned from campus for two terms; it was not until a year later that Rosen filed charges.
Gonzalez, a sophomore at the time of the protest, said he continues to feel monitored by university administrators as he prepares to graduate this year. “It’s difficult to go to classes and try to walk from your library to your classroom and get followed by campus security,” he said. “It feels demeaning, being surveilled to that degree … All I have done is stand up for what I believe in.”