Yale Arrestee Pays $90 Fine; Charges Dropped

Craig Birckhead-Morton took the train from Harlem to New Haven Thursday morning to close out one chapter of his on-campus pro-Palestine activism — before resuming his critique of state violence in the Middle East as a grad student in New York City. 

Birckhead-Morton, 22, was one of over four dozen Yale students to be arrested by campus police on criminal trespassing charges last April. Those arrests came as part of a crackdown on a Beinecke Plaza tent encampment protesting Israel’s war in Gaza and Yale’s investments in weapons manufacturers.

More than 40 of those Yale student arrestees are seeking to have their charges thrown out; they will return to court in late October. Birckhead-Morton decided on Thursday to bring his local protest-arrest cases to an end. 

Wearing a black blazer and white turtleneck, Birckhead-Morton stood alongside local defense attorney David Grudberg and across the witness table from state prosecutor David Strollo in Courtroom A at the state courthouse at 121 Elm St.

Birckhead-Morton agreed to pay a $90 fine for a ​“simple trespassing” infraction related to the April 22 Beinecke encampment arrest. The judge then dismissed the criminal trespassing charge in that case, and accepted the prosecutor’s decision to nolle two separate misdemeanor charges stemming from a May 1 campus protest arrest.

“$90, no costs,” Superior Court Judge Frank Iannotti said. ​“Best of luck.” (Independent of Birckhead-Morton’s cases, several other arrested Yale protesters have also agreed to pay fines to have their cases dropped.)

Before his final brief court appearance, Birckhead-Morton sat on a bench outside of the ground-floor courtroom, working on his laptop to apply for a job with the New York Public Library.

He had taken the train from New York City to New Haven earlier in the day. He said this was his first time back in the city since he graduated from Yale College and began a master’s program at Columbia University. Birckhead-Morton studied history with a concentration in empires and colonialism at Yale; he’s now a master’s student in Columbia’s Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies.

Born and raised in Maryland, Birckhead-Morton told the Independent that he became active in pro-Palestine causes on Yale’s campus in part because of the continuity he saw between domestic critiques of police brutality against Black Americans and Palestinian critiques of state violence by Israel.

He recalled coming to Yale in 2020 amidst a nationwide resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement following the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. He said he was involved in campus protests calling for police reform more broadly, and for the abolition of the Yale Police Department in particular.

He spoke about reading and watching news reports in 2021 and 2022 about Israeli evictions of Palestinians in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem. Protests by young Palestinians against those evictions resonated with him, as an example of ​“young people stepping up to defend our neighbors.”

“I think there’s a connection with policing, militarization, that speaks to people” involved in the Black Lives Matter movement in America. ​“These connections, when it comes to policing, state violence, were really resonating with people,” including him.

Birckhead-Morton said he felt relief to have his New Haven criminal court cases over so he can move on with his life and studies and professional development and activism at Columbia, which was the epicenter of the pro-Palestinian student movement last semester.

Birckhead-Morton said he joined in on the smaller-scale resumption of those protests at his new school. During his first day of classes this semester, he said, after finishing his first Arabic language class, he walked over to 116th Street and spent two hours at a student-led protest.