Maile Hampton is free: Plea deal tosses Sacramento activist’s misdemeanor charge

After two years of court appearances and the changing of a state law, Sacramento activist Maile Hampton will not stand trial for obstructing a peace officer, a misdemeanor charge that stemmed from touching another protestor’s arm for three seconds.

Hampton accepted a plea deal earlier this month that lowered the misdemeanor crime to a simple traffic infraction of failing to comply with a lawful order from a peace officer. Online court records show Hampton was sentenced to community service and informal probation.

Hampton’s arrest came during a Black Lives Matter protest in January 2015. Seeing a fellow protestor get grabbed by a police officer, Hampton briefly took his other forearm. A video of the incident shows Hampton never touched the officer. According to Hampton’s attorney Linda Parisi, the grabbed protestor was never arrested. Hampton was arrested the next day at home.

The case made national headlines because the Sacramento County District Attorney’s Office initially charged Hampton with a felony allegation of “lynching.” Outrage over Hampton’s case eventually led California lawmakers to alter the statute. Meanwhile, in court, Parisi attacked the lynching charge, and the DA’s office eventually refiled Hampton’s case as misdemeanor obstruction.

In January, an SN&R analysis of court records between 2014 and 2016 determined that Sacramento prosecutors were nearly three times more likely to take defendants to trial on a misdemeanor charge of obstructing a peace officer than their counterparts in Alameda, the county most demographically similar to Sacramento.

Cres Vellucci of the National Lawyers Guild told SN&R that Hampton’s plea deal shouldn’t be taken as a sign that local prosecutors are going to stop charging activists with crimes. “The idea appears to be to really discourage people from being out there,” Vellucci observed. “Even if the charges are thrown out later, it’s a form of intimidation through the system.”

Indeed, four people were cited and released for trespassing on April 28, when more than a dozen people associated with Black Lives Matter Sacramento occupied City Hall to protest the commendation of police officers involved in the April 2016 shooting death of Dazion Flenaugh.