San Francisco’s Case Against Pro-Palestinian Activists Who Blocked Bridge Heads to Jury

The seven Bay Area residents — Anandpura, River Allen, Sara Cantor, Rocky Chau, Conrad de Jesus, Sarah Ferrell and Em Tillotson — are charged with felony conspiracy and a slew of misdemeanors, including false imprisonment, for blocking the span of the bridge by chaining themselves to parked cars and each other in its southbound lanes on April 15, 2024.

The Tax Day demonstration was part of an international movement — activists also shut down traffic on Interstate-880 in Oakland, and staged similar protests in San Diego, Seattle, Philadelphia, San Antonio, Chicago and across Mexico, Vietnam and Australia.

In her final statement, Assistant District Attorney Angela Roze quoted a person who was stuck on the Golden Gate Bridge that day: “We all have a right to protest, but I should have had a right to leave,” she said. “In this case, the defendants unilaterally decided to take that right away from everyone on the road.”

She said between 8 a.m. and noon, no cars passed through the bridge’s toll plaza, which usually records 5,000 vehicles in that time.

“The evidence in this case is clear. These seven individuals broke the law, regardless of their message or beliefs,” she said.

Roze spent much of her closing focused on proving conspiracy — the most serious of the charges that carries the longest sentence.

She said that the night before the protest, six of the defendants met in Berkeley and devised the plan to block a thoroughfare.

“That’s when they became guilty of conspiracy to commit false imprisonment,” Roze said, adding that the seventh defendant received a call the same night telling him to meet at a BART station for the protest.

The defendants’ lawyers have focused throughout the trial on setting up a so called “necessity defense” — which requires attorneys to show that the protesters believed they were facing a real, specific and immediate threat to themselves or others; had no reasonable alternative to the action they took; did not create greater danger than the danger they avoided; and did not contribute to or cause the threat.

The attorneys said the protesters had tried expressing their concern through less disruptive means, like calling their local representatives and participating in marches. At the time, as Israel was weighing whether to invade Rafah, a city along Gaza’s southern border where 1 million displaced Palestinians were seeking refuge, they believed the escalation was necessary to save lives.

“When their words were ignored, they had to get louder. And when the invasion of Rafah was imminent, they had to get loudest of all,” defense attorney John Viola said. “They weren’t there to break the law; they were there to enforce the law.”

But ahead of closing arguments, Judge Teresa Caffese declined to give jurors special instructions to consider necessity in their deliberation.

Still, attorneys told the jury that because their clients believed they were protected by the legal justification — which has been used in the past to fight charges against animal activists involved in “open rescues” of animals from factory farms — and therefore should not be found guilty of conspiracy, which requires willfully breaking the law.

The felony conspiracy carries the longest sentence and is one of the harshest filed against activists in comparable cases. Six of the protesters could face 14 years in prison. Cantor could face 15.

“A reasonable doubt does not need to be substantial; it just needs to be reasonable, and if it exists, it means Ms. Tillotson and the rest are not guilty,” public defender Anthony Gedeon said during his closing statement on Thursday.

Closing arguments in the case are expected to wrap up Friday, and the jury could decide on the case as soon as the afternoon.