As many of you know, the twelve defendants have filed a Murguia motion, which alleges that this case is being pursued differently than others for political reasons. This is probably crystal clear to our supporters, but the task of convincing a judge will be considerably more difficult.

We had hoped to have the Murgia motion heard on the 28th, but the presiding judge, after a fit of perplexion, admitted he had not read it. Instead of accepting his ridiculous offer to read this important and lengthy motion in its entirety in 10 minutes before proceeding, our lawyers offered to hold it over for our next court date. As dedicated teachers and students, we believe in the importance of doing one’s homework. This lack of effort will be noted in our evaluations.

Oct. 5, our next court date, will include the hearing of the Murguia motion.

On Oct. 11, we will have a hearing on a motion by UC Davis to quash a subpoena we brought requesting information relevant to our case. So much for UC Davis’s supposed non-involvement in our prosecution.

Thanks for your continued attention and support.

We want to take a moment to update you on our most recent adventures in court, and give you a sense of what’s in store for the fall we move towards trial.

Recent court activity: On Friday, August 24 in Yolo County Superior Court a motion to compel discovery of additional material pertinent to our defense failed; as did a Pitchess motion to dismiss the case on grounds that UCDPD selectively targeted us for prosecution on the basis of our participation in past political protests.

Next court date: Friday, September 21 in Yolo County Superior Court at 725 Court St., Woodland CA. We are not yet sure of the exact department or proceedings set for this date, but it is certain that there will be further hearings of motions advanced by our defense team. We will be sending further updates with additional information as it becomes available.

The summer saw a series of intermediary court dates culminate this past Friday, August 24 in the denial of these two motions by our defense team. One was a motion to discover information pertinent to our defense withheld, to date, by the DA as well as UCDPD, including the names of officers involved in the infamous pepper spraying many of us suffered, along with our fellow students, as we sat peacefully on the quad last November 18th. The other, known as a Pitchess motion, pertains to the amply documented abuse meted out by UCDPD on that occasion, in order to legally establish the common sense cause those officers and UCDPD had to further repress and us harass through extra-legal means during the US Bank protests, given the international media exposure of their misdeeds and excoriating condemnation their scandalous violence met with in the Reynoso and Kroll Reports.

While we were not surprised to find our motions denied, the legal reasoning in accord with which they were shot down is nonetheless enlightening. While to be a politically engaged student who sits on the ground on several occasions is sufficient cause to allege a criminal conspiracy in the eyes of the court, it appears, to be a cop who repeatedly beats and assaults these same politically engaged students while serving as a member of a small, proudly close-knit police force on a public University campus is not sufficient cause to allege even a modicum of legal continuity between events and misdeeds involving identical personnel. We cannot help but note the tautological irony, here, by which we continue to be denied the names and badge numbers of officers known to all the world to be guilty of misconduct on November 18th, at the same time we are denied the right simply to allege a plausible connection between those earlier misdeeds and our retroactive prosecution on the basis of the very same officers’ reports for participation in political protests, solely because we cannot name which officers perpetrated what misdeeds against which of us on each occasion. That the earlier misconduct of those officers was so severe it has repeatedly been publicly condemned by the same UCD administration who later referred us for criminal prosecution for once more sitting on the floor only heightens the legal comedy, and fortifies our resolve to continue the fight against the University’s chosen path of privatization and criminalization of dissent on campus.

In spite of this setback, therefore, we are cautiously optimistic, armed as we are now with a firmer sense of Yolo County’s lofty evidentiary standards, that future motions might meet with greater success. And on that note, we hope we can count on your support and attendance at our next court date on Friday, September 21. As always, we cannot guarantee the quality of the legal theater, but promise our good company as we anticipate further litigation of motions pertinent to our defense. We hope to see you there, and appreciate your continued support; we know court is a drag.

In solidarity,

The Bankers’ Dozen and Friends of the Accused

Clover is an indicted member of the “Davis Dozen”—a group of eleven activist students and one professor (Clover) who were served with arrest notices one month after the US Bank on the Davis campus closed its doors for good, following weeks of protests against the banks’ role in increasing student costs and student debt. Twelve people are now threatened with eleven years each in jail and one million dollars in fines for a purported conspiracy to shut the bank down.”

[full article (The Nation)]

Such overreactions and dark strategies signal a loss of legitimacy and a desperate panic to re-establish it through whatever admixture of thuggish riot cops and dutiful DAs might extinguish the anti-austerity fires. The once-proud university must now lie down with whatever repressive forces it can summon, applying both the rod and the robe to its own population. The hope is to instill enough fear that it can impose its privatization agenda even at this late date—The Shock Doctrine Goes to College.”

[full article (The Nation)]

This is violence by other means, different from the illegal pepper spraying only in terms of tactics, and if we stand by and watch, the university will be rewarded for its violence. The good news is, there are things you can do to help:”

[full article (Daily Kos)]

“Famed Defense Attorney Tony Serra made his first appearance in front of Judge Tim Fall – it was largely uneventful and a matter of formality.  Mr. Matzat pled not guilty to the charges and they set, at least for now, a preliminary hearing for July 18.

[full article (Davis Vanguard)]

“Sometime in July, in a court in Yolo County, California, eleven students and one professor at the University of California Davis will stand trial, accused of the “willful” and “malicious” act of protesting peacefully in front of a bank branch situated on their University campus.

There has been in recent months a great deal of online coverage of the brutality of public order policing at Davis. The treatment of the Davis Dozen, however, promises more longstanding injury. If found guilty, each faces charges of up to eleven years in prison and $1 million in fines.

The immediate history of the case stretches back to autumn 2008, when state budget cuts trickled down to the partly state-funded University of California. The administration of that University responded by announcing that tuition fees would be increased by 32%, prompting several months of vocal student protests and campus occupations, violently suppressed by the state authorities.

As the collapse of the US banking sector caused the State of California to withdraw its funding for its public Universities, those same Universities turned to the banking sector for financial support. On 3 November 2009, just two weeks before riot police would end a student occupation at UC Berkeley by firing rubber bullets and tear gas at the students and faculty gathered outside, the University of California Davis announced on its website a new deal with US Bank, the high street banking division of U.S Bancor, the fifth largest commercial bank in the United States.

According to the terms of that deal, US Bank would provide UC Davis with a campus branch and a variable revenue stream, to be determined by the University’s success in urging its own students to sign up for US Bank accounts. In return UC Davis would print US Bank logos on all student ID cards, which from 2010 would be convertible into ATM cards attached to US Bank accounts. Just at the moment when, on the campus of UC Berkeley, riot police were beating up and shooting students who protested against austerity, fee increases, and their handmaiden, debt, the management of UC Davis was selling the debt of its own students to U.S. Bancor, the corporate beneficiary of “austerity.”

The poet and critic Joshua Clover, who has written extensively on those police actions, is among the twelve who sat down in front of the Davis branch of US Bank in protest, and who now faces the prospect of sitting in a cell in the Monroe County Detention Center until 2024, has argued that “the rise in tuition and indebtedness simply is the militarization of campus”. These processes, Clover says, “are one and the same”. The claim concerning police violence will not seem exaggerated to anyone who has watched the videos on You Tube of the police action at Davis.

The sit-down protests outside the UC Davis Branch of US Bank, in which the “UC Davis Dozen” were only a few of many participants, were not only peaceful; they were, in effect, the active demilitarization of campus. Their point was to make explicit the connection between corporate banking, state austerity and an increasingly militaristic police presence in universities.

US Bank closed its branch in the UC Davis Memorial Union Building in March. The sit-down protests were a success. That such effective protest cannot be tolerated is evident from the response of the University administration and the Yolo County District Attorney. The charges against the Davis Dozen have a notable history of service: “Obstructing movement in a public place” was an indictment invented to criminalise homelessness in Alabama. The Davis Dozen are to learn – on behalf of everyone affected by austerity – that protest against the conditions which lead to homelessness is criminalised by the same legislation that makes homelessness illegal. For the bankers, millionaire University administrators and state functionaries for whom “revenue” is to be maximised no matter what the cost to the people they serve, this paradox is no paradox at all.

We are grateful to the Davis Dozen for the example of principled and eloquent bravery in response to intolerable extensions of police and corporate power at a time when the poorest are being deterred from university study by the prospect of unmanageable debt. We, internationally located artists, critics, and writers, ask that the Davis Dozen be acquitted of these extraordinarily severe and ignoble charges, to which they have courageously pleaded “not guilty”.

Signed:

Dr. David Nowell-Smith, Université Paris VII – Denis Diderot, Prof. Robert Hampson, Royal Holloway, Dr. Daniele Pantano, Edge Hill University, Olivier Brossard, Maître de conférences, littérature américaine, Université Paris Est-Marne la Vallée, David Gorin Jean-Jacques Pouce, Fellow, Internationales Kolleg Morphomata, Genese, Dynamik, Medialität kultureller Figurationen, Daisy Fried Abigail Lang, Maître de conférences (Associate Professor), Université Paris-Diderot, Paris, Michelle Levy Schulz Dominique Pasqualini, Directeur de l’école EMA Fructidor (School of media and fine arts, Director), Chalon-sur-Saône, Sean Bonney, Marianne Morris, poet, UC Falmouth, Keston Sutherland, Reader in English, University of Sussex, Orlando Reade, University of Cambridge Binh Nguyen, San Diego, CA, Janet Holmes, Boise State University B, arry Schwabsky, art critic, The Nation, Robert Kiely, Birkbeck College Kent Johnson John Wilkinson, poet, Professor of Practice in the Arts, University of Chicago Alvin D. Greenberg, Boise State University Dr. Alberto Toscano, Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths Stacy Blint, Disappearing Books Katy Balma, Fulbright Fellow and Teaching Assistant, University of Connecticut Wendy Battin, poet and essayist David Lau, Lana Turner Magazine Nick-e Melville, poet and lecturer at Motherwell College, Scotland Peter Phillpott, Great Works, modernpoetry.org.uk Patrick Pritchett, Lecturer, History and Literature, Harvard University Robert Archembeau, Professor of English, Lake Forest College (Illinois) Rob Holloway, Joseph Kaplan, Dr. Jeffrey Pethybridge, Susquehanna University Dr. Don Stinson, Northern Oklahoma College George Cunningham, Hansa Arts Joseph Walton Hugh McDonnell, University of Amsterdam Megan Kaminski, Creative Writing Lecturer, University of Kansas Jose A. Alcantara K.E Allen, Lecturer in English, Comprehensive Studies Program, University of Michigan Allan Peterson, Gulf Breeze, FL Siobain Walker Dr. Nina Power, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Roehampton Francesca Lisette Caitlin Doherty, University of Cambridge Frances Richard, Barnard College Ryan Dobran, University of Cambridge Dr. Cathy Wagner, Miami University, OH John Bloomberg-Rissman, University of California, Riverside Carla Harryman, Associate Professor of Literature, Eastern Michigan University Robert Ellen Joel Duncan, University of Notre Dame Jared Schickling, Adjunct Professor, Humanities Division, Niagara Count Community College Dr. Ian Patterson, Fellow, Tutor, Director of Studies in English,  Queens’ College, University of Cambridge Dr. Lisa Samuels, Associate Professor, University of Auckland, New Zealand Ian Heames, University od Cambridge Prof. Alex Davis, University College Cork John Temple Jonathan B. Highfield Dr. Jennifer Cooke, Lecturer in English, Loughborough University Dr. Zoe Skoulding, Bangor University Kashka Georgeson David Grundy, University of Cambridge Luke McMullan Josh Robison, University of Cambridge Josh Stanley, Phd Student, Yale University Luke Roberts, Phd candidate, University of Cambridge Gareth Durasow.”

[full article (New Statesman)]

Both cases also appear to be part of a growing trend to chill dissent through false arrests and trumped up charges. In some cases, the police use a tactic of “mass arrests” during a demonstration. Other times, as in the cases of both the Santa Cruz Eleven and the Davis Dozen, charges are selectively filed, weeks or months after a demonstration has ended, against targeted activists. These repressive tactics of the state are meant to put people through a tremendous burden, even if they are fortunate enough to have their charges eventually dismissed.”

[full article (indybay)]

“Since the financial institution’s logo is often stamped on campus IDs, students may sign up for an account because they believe the university has endorsed the product, the report says. In some instances, students have to open an account if they want to obtain their funds quickly.

Campus debit cards are wolves in sheep’s clothing,” Rich Williams, higher education advocate for U.S. Public Interest Research Group Education Fund and lead author of the report, said in releasing the report. “Students think they can access their dollars freely, but instead their aid is being eaten up in fees.”

[full article (The New York Times)]



But it seems that the University administration has successfully evaded scrutiny of the role it played in a series of events that began in January at UC Davis when 12 protesters, some of whom had been pepper-sprayed in November, staged another peaceful sit-in at the campus branch of US Bank.  The sit-in was an important political action in defense of public funding of the University and against the replacement of that funding by private contracts with corporations.  The protestors won an enormous victory when US Bank closed it University branch on February 28, possibly breaking its agreement with UC Davis.

Banks have no place on University campuses for many reasons. Part of the function of the contract UC Davis had with US Bank allowed the administration’s continued shift of funding of the University from public to private sources. This is particularly problematic when the private source of funding is a corporate bank, because banks make money from rising tuition costs, in the form of interest from student loans.  In other words: university contracts with banks encourage tuition hikes, because banks stand to profit directly from rising tuition, while the administration comes to rely on funding from bank contracts.”

[full article (AlterNet)]