All 57 University of Texas at Austin students who were arrested for trespassing during a pro-Palestinian protest on campus Wednesday have had their charges dropped by the county attorney’s office, the Austin American-Statesman reported.
Defense lawyers found problems with the probable cause arrest affidavits, documents police use to prove an arrest was warranted; Nouha Ezouhri, an attorney with the Travis County public defender’s office who helped file jail release forms for the arrested students, said that it looked as though the institution’s police had “copied and pasted” the language from one affidavit to the next. County Attorney Delia Garza, whose office prosecutes misdemeanor charges, agreed that the documents contained “deficiencies.”
However, the police could revise the affidavits and press charges against the protesters as far as two years out from the date of the arrests.
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