How Attorneys, Advocates, and Judges Worked to Review UT Protest Arrests

On Monday, April 29, law enforcement dragged dehydrated protesters, arresting them from the encampment one by one (Photos by Lina Fisher)

The calls started coming into the Austin Lawyers Guild arrest hotline around 2:30pm on Wednesday, April 24, shortly after University of Texas police officers began arresting demonstrators at a peaceful, pro-Palestine protest held on campus.

Those calls served as the starting gun in a relay race that began as an effort to have the 57 protesters arrested for criminal trespass released from jail but morphed into a multi-pronged community effort that resulted in dropped charges for every person arrested at the protest that day. The Chronicle interviewed more than a dozen individuals who worked across every aspect of the justice system to learn how the effort came together.

Friends, family members, and justice advocates called the hotline – established in 2016 to provide the Austin community with a way of contacting defense attorneys during mass arrest events – to share first-, second-, and thirdhand accounts of reported arrests. Paul Quinzi, one of the criminal defense attorneys who helped establish the guild’s hotline, began compiling a list of suspected arrestees’ names to supply to attorneys who were en route to the Travis County Jail. Their goal: Get as many of the protesters out of jail on personal recognizance as possible.

By early evening, Skip Davis and George Lobb – two criminal defense attorneys who would later play a critical role in transforming the initial bond effort into an effort for an outright dismissal of the arrests – were on-scene at the jail, trying to get appointed as defense counsel to clients who had been booked into the jail. Within a few hours, they had begun the bond process on a half-dozen or so arrests that had received the stamp of approval from city magistrate judges. Those individuals were on their way to a jail stay that could last anywhere from 12 to 48 hours, but intervention from defense counsel could help shorten it.

As Davis, Lobb, and a host of other defense attorneys were beginning their work, Travis County’s Chief Public Defender Adeola Ogunkeyede emerged from a long day of meetings to reports of the mass arrests. She and several attorneys who work for her in the Public Defender’s Office also made their way to the jail to figure out how they could be appointed as defense counsel to people placed under arrest – a process that typically takes days to occur. On an average day, Central Booking books about 80 people into jail; on April 24, the number was 157 – the volume of arrests was set to slow the whole process down significantly.

All the while, prosecutors in the County Attorney’s Office were reviewing the probable-cause affidavits submitted by UTPD officers justifying each arrest – arrests that County Attorney Delia Garza described as an “overwhelming police response to what appears to have been a peaceful demonstration.” Garza could dismiss the charges under her office’s early arrest review policy, but doing so could motivate a petition to remove her from office, like the one District Attorney José Garza is currently facing. Sources say concern over a potential petition prompted Delia Garza to approach mass dismissal of the arrests with trepidation.

Separately, Travis County Judge Denise Hernández, who has overseen County Court at Law No. 6 since 2023, volunteered her time. Hernández, who runs the county’s Transformative Youth Justice diversion program for defendants between the ages of 17 and 20, emailed criminal defense organizations to inform them that she would be available that night to look over arrest and bond paperwork. She arrived at the courthouse later that night, sources say, to expedite that work.

As Hernández reviewed requests for personal recognizance bonds, Lobb and Davis had a revelation that would transform the bond effort to one of outright dismissal of charges. In 2005, Davis successfully argued a case (Ford v. State) before the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals where the court held that an arrest should be voided unless the arresting officer cites “specific articulable facts” in their probable-cause affidavit supporting the arrest.

Lobb and Davis noticed the affidavits they were working on all shared a striking dearth of articulable facts, an argument they eventually made before prosecutors and Hernández in her courtroom chambers. Hernández agreed, prosecutors agreed not to oppose rejections of the remaining cases, and from there the stage was set.

After working into the early morning hours of Thursday, April 25, Hernández and three city of Austin municipal judges had dismissed the charges associated with 46 of the arrests – all citing Ford v. State. By the next afternoon, the County Attorney’s Office had dismissed the remaining 11 arrests, also for lack of probable cause.

All of the people the Chronicle talked to about the effort agreed that it was a demonstration of what a community committed to the ideals of a fair, efficient justice system can accomplish. (Travis County Sheriff’s Office personnel also helped by quickly moving people and paperwork needed to expedite the dismissals and jail releases.)

“It was really a community effort,” Quinzi said. “Prosecutors were open to the arguments put forth by defense counsel, and our judges really stepped up to help move things along. Without all of that collaboration, people would have probably spent another half day in jail, at least.”

As the Chronicle went to press May 1, the 79 people who were arrested at the April 29 protest had all been released from jail.