The felony conspiracy prosecution that once threatened seven Golden Gate Bridge protesters with up to 15 years in prison ended Friday with a sentence measured in days: a month apiece, half of it worked off away from jail, and even that frozen while the defendants appeal.

For more than two years, District Attorney Brooke Jenkins built the 2024 bridge blockade into the most aggressive prosecution of any recent Bay Area protest — a case that at its peak carried a 15-year felony ceiling. On Friday, after a jury had already cut it down to misdemeanors, a San Francisco judge closed it out: 30 days in county jail, six months of probation, a $1,000 fine, and credit for time already served. None of the seven is headed to a cell immediately, and the last felony counts are now gone for good.

The seven activists — Bhavika Anandpura, Conrad de Jesus, Em Tillotson, River Allen, Rocky Chau, Sara Cantor and Sarah Ferrell — were sentenced Friday for chaining themselves across the southbound lanes of the Golden Gate Bridge on April 15, 2024, freezing the morning commute for hours to protest U.S. support for Israel's war in Gaza. Each drew a 30-day term, six months of probation and a $1,000 fine, NBC Bay Area reported↗ (external source, opens in a new tab). Half of those days can be logged on work release instead of behind bars, and each defendant gets credit for four days spent in custody after the 2024 arrest.

Even the remainder is on hold. The judge granted bail and stayed the jail time while the defendants appeal, so no one reports to a cell now. More consequential than the sentence itself: prosecutors told the court they would not retry the deadlocked felony conspiracy count, because a second trial would not serve "the best interest of justice." That count — the one that had made this a potential prison case — is now off the table, ending the felony exposure that hung over the defendants for two years.

It is a striking place for a prosecution to land. The blockade produced charges against 26 people; most had them dropped or scaled back after prosecutors conceded they lacked evidence for the gravest counts, and only seven chose a jury trial — the group facing prison terms of up to 15 years, The San Francisco Standard reported↗ (external source, opens in a new tab). In July, jurors before Judge Teresa Caffese convicted all seven of misdemeanors while splitting 10-2 toward guilt on conspiracy and 11-1 against the trespassing charge — enough disagreement to hang both. Defense lawyers underscored the imbalance by pointing to demonstrators who blocked the bridge during the 2023 APEC summit and walked away with five hours of community service.

Supporters who packed Friday's hearing rejected the idea that a traffic blockade warranted any cell at all; one, Jordan Harger, called the prospect of the seven spending even another night in jail horrifying. The defense has framed the entire case as punishment for politics. "We do not fight solely to win. We fight to fight," Deputy Public Defender Nuha Abusamra told a City Hall press conference. She called blocking traffic for a few hours the bare minimum American citizens should be doing while U.S. tax dollars funded the war in Gaza.

From the bench, the judge rejected that framing, reaching for Martin Luther King Jr. and his writing on civil disobedience, according to NBC Bay Area. The court noted the protesters had chained themselves inside their vehicles and relented only when their property was threatened — the CHP had warned it would need to saw the cars apart to clear the span. Jenkins, for her part, has insisted throughout that the prosecution was about public safety, not speech, arguing that constitutional rights "carry responsibilities" and must be exercised within the law.

But the arithmetic tells its own story. A case opened with the specter of 15 years closes with a couple of weeks of work release — postponed — and not a single felony conviction. Whether the appeal erases even that will be argued when the defendants return to court in October.