Recently,
11 University of California, Irvine and UC Riverside students have
pleaded not guilty to charges stemming from the disruption of a
speech by the Israeli ambassador to the United States.
The
students were arrested on Feb. 8, 2010, at UC Irvine after protesting
the speech by Michael Oren on U.S.-Israeli security. The students
were arraigned on April 15, more than a year later, in the Orange
County Superior Court on misdemeanor conspiracy to disturb a meeting
and misdemeanor disturbance of a meeting.
The
charges against the Irvine 11 and the drawing out of this entire
ordeal are absurd. The same type of heckling for which the Irvine 11
are being prosecuted occurs at universities around the world.
Earlier
this month, Jewish students at Brandeis University disrupted a Q&A
session following Israeli parliamentarian Avi Dichter’s speech at
the university. Students stood up one by one, accusing Dichter of war
crimes, then left the room. Although the incident at UC Irvine was
similar in execution, the Brandeis students have not been prosecuted.
Similarly,
Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech at the Jewish Federations
General Assembly in New Orleans in November was marked by repeated
heckling from young Jewish audience members. The coordinator of that
protest, 17-year-old college student Hannah King of Seattle, said her
group sought to protest the attempt to delegitimize criticism of
Israeli policies, which she said goes against Jewish values.
There
have been no reported arrests of Jewish students stemming from these
incidents of heckling.
The case of the
Irvine 11, however, is being considered differently by the Orange
County District Attorney. Internal Orange County DA emails’ subject
headings have referred to the case as the “UCI Muslim case,”
suggesting that the religion of the alleged perpetrators was key to
the decision to prosecute, as opposed to the nature of the disruption
or alleged conspiracy to disrupt a meeting.
One of the attorneys
for the Irvine 11, Daniel Mayfield, has submitted
a
Motion to Remove the DA of Orange County. The motion proposes that
the Superior Court of California in Orange County take the case away
from the DA and instead put it into the hands of the Court due to
“the attorney being guilty of a conflict of interest that may
prejudice him against the accused.” According to California Penal
Code § 1424, a trial judge may exercise his or her power to
disqualify a district attorney from participating in the prosecution
of a criminal charge when the judge determines that a conflict of
interest is in fact an issue during a case.
The parties are due
back at Santa Ana’s Central Justice Center on May 13 to argue before
Superior Court Judge Peter J. Wilson as to whether portions of the
grand jury investigation should be unsealed. The judge has set a
pretrial date of June 30 and a trial date of August 15.
If
convicted on all charges, each defendant could face up to six months
in jail.
Liberation interviews Dan Mayfield,
one of the attorneys for the Irvine 11, to find out more about the
current status of the case.
Liberation: Why do you think it is
important to defend the Irvine 11?
Dan Mayfield: Because what the
defendants in this case are doing is standing up for everyone’s
right to be able to speak truth to power. So the bottom line is that
this is a first-amendment case. There are obviously other overtones
to it, having to do with the role of the university in terms of
speakers that are brought to the university and how that certain
class of speakers is promoted at the university level and the
necessity of being able to speak out, to respond, to that kind of
one-sided presentation of the issues.
Liberation: So would you say that there
is kind of a differentiation between who has the right to exercise
first-amendment rights?
DM: I wouldn’t put it that way; I
would say that in regards to the role of the university in presenting
only certain limited points of view. When that happens, it is very
important to speak out and to be heard and to exercise your
first-amendment rights. I don’t see it as a question of the
university trying to trample their rights in their choice of
speakers, but they trampled people’s first-amendment right in their
choice of using the police to patrol the situation.
Liberation: Some Jewish groups and
others have done similar things at other schools, so what do you
think is different about the 11?
DM: The difference in the Irvine 11
case is primarily that Irvine is in Orange County and that the OCDA
office is using this politically. For their own uses, for running for
office in the future, for examples of how to control dissent, that
sort of thing.
Liberation: What kind of consequences
will the students face if they are found guilty of the charges?
DM: I don’t think the immediate
consequences of a guilty verdict, which let me say, I don’t expect
in this case, will be horribly harsh. They technically face up to six
months in jail. It’s very unlikely that anybody would receive a
sentence even close to that. On the other hand, a conviction for a
misdemeanor is something that stays with, stays on your record, for
governmental purposes. Like applying for a state license, to be a
teacher, a lawyer, a doctor, anything like that, requires a state
license and the conviction remains forever. There are consequences
were they to be found guilty. It’s a very good case and I very much
doubt there will be a guilty verdict.
Liberation: How do you predict all of
this will end?
DM: They won’t be found guilty
because they have the right to speak out. It’s a different kind of
case than your usual so-called protest case. In this instance, you
have a speaker who is a very strong spokesperson for one point of
view sponsored by the university, speaking in an open forum, and that
speaker who is giving a political speech has to expect that not
everyone is going to agree with him. That is your first-amendment
right to not agree, and as long as you are not engaged in violence
then the give and take of ideas is both appreciated and promoted by
the Constitution and that is essentially what the Constitution is all
about.
