A Belchertown judge has dismissed charges against a former UMass Amherst Students for Justice in Palestine leader stemming from her involvement in a protest in May 2024, following her successful completion of a negotiated pre-trial probation last month.
The deal struck between Maysoun Batley and the Northwestern District Attorney’s Office required Batley to complete 20 hours of community service and write formal letters of apology to the UMass Police Department and to Massachusetts State Police Sgt. Luis Rodriguez, who alleged that Batley committed a criminal assault by spitting on him.
The dismissal, coming nearly two years after the university brought in about 160 state and local police to break up a Gaza solidarity encampment and arrest 134 people, marks the end of a protracted legal battle for Batley, who admitted no wrongdoing and contends she is innocent. Batley was the only person still facing criminal charges related to the May 2024 protest.
“It was absolutely destroying me, my anxiety,” Batley told The Shoestring. “I couldn’t function with this gray cloud over my head, in addition to the black cloud that is witnessing genocide on a daily basis.”
Batley and the DA’s office reached an agreement called pre-trial probation. It’s a disposition in which the defendant does not admit to any factual evidence or wrongdoing, and following the completion of the probationary period, charges are dismissed. It’s distinct from probation issued following a finding of guilt in that the defendant voluntarily consents to the probationary conditions.
In the summer of 2024, The Shoestring reported that UMass police had filed felony charges against Batley and co-president of Students for Justice in Palestine Ruya Hazeyen, neither of whom had been arrested during the protest crackdown. Both were charged with “inciting to riot,” and Batley was additionally charged with assault and battery on a police officer.
Less than a week later, the university confirmed it was dropping those charges. A week after that, Massachusetts State Police filed a renewed criminal complaint for the assault charge with the clerk magistrate, bypassing the DA’s prosecutorial discretion. “This was not an NWDA decision,” a spokesperson told The Shoestring at the time.
Batley told The Shoestring she feels as if she was made an example of, a warning to would-be student activists. “Cases like mine are brought to court not because of any type of legitimacy, not because a cop was actually assaulted, or any harm was done, but to use as an example for other students,” Batley said. “If you have the audacity to speak up against what is happening we will ruin your life.”
Rodriguez, who could not be reached for comment, may have witnessed violence in the Gaza region firsthand. In 2017, a Massachusetts State Police press release announced that then-Lt. Col. Luis Rodriguez, commander of the 181st Infantry Regiment of the Massachusetts Army National Guard, and four other enlisted state troopers were to be deployed on an 11-month Multinational Force and Observers mission to the Sinai Peninsula of Egypt.
Part of a longstanding peacekeeping operation meant to ensure peace between Egypt and Israel, the deployment coincided with a period in which the Egyptian military demolished homes along the Egypt-Gaza border amid fighting with Islamic State affiliates. Rodriguez’s unit would not have been involved in any offensive military actions, and were only armed for self-defense.
Col. James N. Downey, staff judge advocate for the Massachusetts Army National Guard, told The Shoestring that they could not corroborate the location of Rodriguez’s deployment, citing national security exemptions to the Freedom of Information Act.
Rodriguez would have returned to the United States coincidentally around the same time as Batley, who said she is a U.S. citizen but grew up in Lebanon, and moved to the U.S. in 2018.
Six years later, the two would encounter each other at UMass, where Rodriguez claims Batley spit on him amid a barrage of taunts and insults. Batley contends she did not, and felt strongly enough that she was prepared to allow the case against her to proceed to trial, rather than make an admission of guilt to a crime she did not commit.
Last July, a court found that while video footage of the incident was relevant to the case, it was not itself sufficiently exculpatory to support the defense’s motion to dismiss.
About a month later, Batley decided she’d had enough. Her attorney, Jack Godleski, represented her at a reduced rate. But traveling from Brooklyn to Belchertown every few weeks, the time away from work it caused, and the impact it had on her professional advancement made the cost of proving to a jury of her peers she did not commit the alleged offense unsustainable, she told The Shoestring.
“It was so emotionally taxing. It was so continuously disappointing,” Batley said. “I had to find a job that is so chill with my activism and with who I am that they are OK with me leaving in the middle of the week every couple months for a meaningless court date where nothing of substance will actually happen.”
Ultimately, in order to put the affair behind her, Batley agreed to conditions of pre-trial probation. Asked why an apology was warranted, given that Batley had not admitted to wrongdoing, the DA declined comment.
Multiple requests for comment to both UMass police and the university went unanswered.
Batley’s apology to UMass police read, in its entirety: “On May 7th 2024 we had an encounter during a demonstration. I am sorry for how the situation turned out. I ask you to accept my apology.”
Prosecutors accepted that, but they rejected a similarly brief apology letter to Rodriguez:
“On May 7th 2024 there was an encounter. I regret the way it went. I regret calling you a psychopath, a sociopath, a pervert and a fascist. I especially regret making fun of your height. Body shaming has never aligned with my beliefs- it is not who I am.”
It is not clear whose decision it was to reject the letter, but Batley was forced to write a new one.
“As I’m writing this,” she wrote in the new letter, “I am once again watching Lebanon be bombed from a distance.”
“I feel a deep sickness in the pit of my stomach every day as I go to work, knowing that every time my phone buzzes another bomb has struck, while my coworkers go about their lives in total ignorance. I feel broken knowing that even if I did engage in protest and organize the way I did in college, still nothing would change. In that way, I guess, the system has succeeded in breaking my spirit,” Batley wrote in the letter.
Informed of The Shoestring’s findings regarding Rodriguez’s deployment to the Middle East, Batley said, “I would write it differently knowing what I know now, but the first draft still stands.”
With her permission, The Shoestring is sharing it in full below.