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Judge considers barring AG from prosecuting UM pro-Palestinian protester cases Posted on April 29, 2025 at 02:19:42 PM by rkm
Judge considers barring AG from prosecuting UM pro-Palestinian protester cases
Michigan Public | By Beenish Ahmed
Published April 26, 2025 at 4:15 PM EDT
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“This illegal discharge in the river was a direct result of (Rajinder) Minhas, as the director in charge of this facility's dangerous daily operations," said Michigan Attorney Dana Nessel.
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel at a press conference in Grand Rapids on September 29, 2022.
A judge in Ann Arbor heard arguments this week over whether he should order the Michigan attorney general to step aside from prosecuting the cases of seven people arrested during a police raid at a pro-Palestinian encampment at the University of Michigan.
Defense attorneys said Attorney General Dana Nessel acknowledged that she’s perceived as biased against Arab and Muslim people in a separate case, and that admission should disqualify her from overseeing the prosecution of the protesters’ cases as well.
Judge Cedric Simpson said he will decide on the motion for a recusal at a hearing on May 5.
At the heart of the two-hour deliberation Thursday were two paragraphs in a petition filed by the attorney general's office earlier this month seeking a special prosecutor to take over an election fraud case against Hamtramck City Council members. Hamtramck is the only city in the country with an all-Muslim city council.
The petition, filed by Assistant Attorney General and Criminal Bureau Chief Danielle Hagaman-Clark, noted that critics have alleged – “albeit without justification” – that Nessel brought charges against pro-Palestinian protesters at U of M “due to bias against Muslims and/or people of Arab descent.”
Nessel does not harbor anti-Muslim or anti-Arab bias, Hagaman-Clark said, but defense attorneys in the U of M protesters case seized on the assertion that Nessel is perceived as biased to argue that the attorney general should recuse herself from the protesters’ cases as well.
That left Hagaman-Clark backtracking from the assertion, and arguing that the request for a special prosecutor stemmed more from the attorney general’s protest against a specific resolution passed by the Hamtramck City Council members.
That resolution banned the display of nongovernmental flags, including the pride flag, on government buildings. Nessel, who is gay, spoke out against that policy.
Unlike the majority of defendants in the Hamtramck case, the majority of those charged at U of M are not Muslim. The cause of Palestine, however, has broad support from Muslims and Arabs.
The phrase
Jamil Khuja, who, along with another defense attorney, Amir Makled, first filed the motion for a recusal, argued that Nessel made personally-motivated public statements toward issues related to the U of M protester case – ones that he contended run parallel to the reasons she is seeking a special prosecutor in Hamtramck.
Khuja said statements Nessel made at a November press conference relate directly to the case against the protesters.
Several navy blue camping tents line up outside in between two large trees in front of a brick building.
Beth Weiler
/
Michigan Public
A coalition of U of M students was camping out on the diag in 2024, asking for the Board of Regents to divest from any companies with ties to Israel's war in Gaza.
After U.S. Representative Rashida Tlaib (D-MI 12), the only Palestinian-American member of Congress, called a rallying cry commonly heard at pro-Palestinian demonstrations, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” “an aspirational call for freedom, human rights and peaceful coexistence, not death, destruction and hate” on social media, Nessel spoke out.
"Those words are anti-Semitic to us,” Nessel said and gestured toward herself and State Senator Jeremy Moss (D-Southfield), whom she sat beside in a press conference. Both of the elected officials are Jewish. "And that's why we've asked [Tlaib] to stop using that kind of language. It's still painful – it still hurts us – and we're still asking her to stop."
Moss said the phrase “has been used by those who want to kill, maim, harm, destroy Jews.” He added, "The phrase has been co-opted as a battle cry for those who want to eradicate Jews who live in Israel from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea."
Khuja said the views Moss and Nessel expressed show she has personal interest in the cases of the pro-Palestinian protesters, and he said that flies in the face of the kind of impartiality with which prosecutors are required to approach their work. “That is a phrase that these protesters, and just about every protest demanding Palestinian rights going back decades, has used,” Khuja said. “And so if you feel that you would be biased in Hamtramck, you cannot be impartial here.”
By making a personal statement against its use, he argued, the attorney general took a position – which is the same reason she is seeking a recusal in the Hamtramck case.
Arguing for the attorney general, Hagaman-Clark, Nessel’s criminal bureau chief, said Nessel has directly called out the defendants in the Hamtramck case, whereas she made no direct statements against the pro-Palestinian protesters. Hagaman-Clark argued that Nessel had only spoken to the different interpretations of a controversial phrase, and noted that she is a champion of free speech.
“There has been no conduct by the AG other than to say that lawful, peaceful, permitted protests are not against the law,” she told the judge. “[Nessel] encourages folks to engage in that behavior. But that is not what we have here.”
The paragraph
It was Hagaman-Clark who wrote the petition seeking a special prosecutor in the Hamtramck election fraud case. She argued the attorney general should be recused from the case to avoid “even the appearance of impropriety” since she had rallied against a decision by the Hamtramck City Council members charged with election fraud.
She went one step further though, to say that Nessel’s prosecution of the pro-Palestine protesters had fostered a perception that she was biased against Muslims and Arabs – like the city council members.
“Attorney General Nessel has also been criticized for her prosecutions of pro-Palestinian protesters at the University of Michigan,” Hagaman-Clark wrote. “Critics have alleged, albeit without justification, that these prosecutions were brought due to bias against Muslims and/or people of Arab descent. It is likely similar criticisms would be raised if prosecutions were brought here as suspects 1-5 [in the Hamtramck case] are of Arab descent.”
These paragraphs from the Michigan Attorney General's petition for a special prosecutor in a Hamtramck election fraud case weighed heavily in a hearing over whether her office should recuse itself from the cases of pro-Palestine protesters at the University of Michigan.
These paragraphs from the Michigan Attorney General's petition for a special prosecutor in a Hamtramck election fraud case weighed heavily in a hearing over whether her office should recuse itself from the cases of pro-Palestine protesters at the University of Michigan.
Hagaman-Clark admitted to making a mistake in that characterization. The city council members aren’t Arab; they actually have roots in Bangladesh. Khuja said the error was further evidence of prejudice.
Khuja suggested that the attorney general had made assumptions about the city council members’ identities being related to their political beliefs. He said those same assumptions would further taint Nessel’s ability to fairly prosecute the protesters' cases.
“I don't know what the relevance is of those individuals, even if they are Arab, [or] all of them or some of them are from Bangladesh or if their religion is Islam. I don't know what bearing that has on this case and why this case,” he said. “But the attorney general felt that they're all together: Those Arabs and those Muslims in Hamtramck and these kids protesting for Palestinian rights in Ann Arbor, they're all the same. If I'm biased against some, I'm biased against all of them. That's the position they took.”
Hagaman-Clark first admitted that she had been “inartful” in those paragraphs of her petition. She later said she regretted writing them as Judge Simpson repeatedly questioned her about the single paragraph referencing the protesters’ cases.
“It really is the attorney general's own statement and confluence of these cases and who these people are that make this an issue,” Simpson said.
“Yeah,” Hagaman-Clark agreed. “I would say that I should not have added it. Standing here before the court today, if I had to do it over again, I certainly would not have.”
The Letter
The other issue that Simpson returned to repeatedly was how the attorney general came to prosecute the cases against the protesters. This question has been of intense interest to those involved in pro-Palestinian activism, especially after an investigation by The Guardian that outlined numerous personal and financial connections between Nessel and the university’s Board of Regents.
“Were these cases just sitting for somebody to come along and grab? I mean, what was happening here to these cases?” Simpson asked, reiterating a version of a question he would ask several times throughout the hearing.
According to Hagaman-Clark, the attorney general’s office had been investigating other incidents at the University of Michigan, including pro-Palestinian protests at the Honors Convocation and the University of Michigan Museum of Art, when the police raided the tent encampment last May.
Three days later, the attorney general sent a letter to the general counsel at U of M, saying that her office would investigate the raid as well.
Simpson wanted to know why Washtenaw County Prosecutor Eli Savit didn’t bring charges, since the cases were all within his jurisdiction.
“It’s not that Prosecutor Savit was unwilling to prosecute them,” defense attorney Amir Makled told the judge. “This attorney general's office went and solicited this work and picked up these files.”
In fact, Makled argued, Savit had brought charges against four people who were involved in a “sit-in” at the Ruthven administration building in November 2023 – but those cases wound up taking a much different course than those being prosecuted by Nessel’s office.
All four were charged with felonies for obstructing a police officer – the same charge faced by the seven arrested in relation to the encampment raid. One also faced a felony for disarming an officer.
A judge dismissed charges against two after Savit allowed them to participate in a diversion program for young offenders. The other two entered into plea agreements which resulted in misdemeanors.
Those cases were resolved within nine months, while the encampment cases, prosecuted by Nessel's office, are still in the pre-trial phase nearly a year after the inciting incident. Defense attorneys noted that cases with such low-level charges as obstructing police and trespassing are rarely handled on the state level.
Makled contended that the attorney general pursued “selective prosecutions” with “more vigor” because she wanted to see different outcomes in these cases.
Hagaman-Clark took issue with that account. She noted that there is “prosecutorial discretion” in deciding to bring any case. She said that the attorney general’s office pursued the cases related to the encampment raid because of expertise in the area of free speech.
Hagaman-Clark said she talked to Savit over the phone, and he agreed to allow the state prosecutor’s office to handle the encampment cases.
While the letter filed to U of M’s general counsel was just three days after the encampment raid, Hagaman-Clark said it was sent because her office had already begun looking into related incidents at the university. Nessel announced charges in the encampment raid and other protest cases in September, and noted that an investigation into vandalism at the homes of people affiliated with the university was “ongoing.”
“I think we all know we were investigating something much bigger and events that had gone across multiple counties,” she said referring to investigations into vandalism at the homes of people in leadership positions at the University. “We are the only in this state that has multi-jurisdictional authority.”
This week, the FBI along with local and state police raided personal residences in three cities, following what the attorney general’s office described as a “yearlong investigation into coordinated criminal acts of vandalism and property damage occurring in multiple counties in southeastern Michigan.”
Editor's note: The University of Michigan holds Michigan Public's broadcast license.