For almost a year, the UCLA Police Department has maintained cell phones of 40 UCLA students who arrested last year the mass demonstrations about the war in Gaza.
Without their phones, the students faced extreme difficulties, according to the lawyers affiliated with the National Lawyer Guild. At least one student lost his job when his employer could not communicate with her, a Daily Bruin journalist student said he hindered the newspaper’s reports, and a student lost a change in an internship. Some students had trouble staying in contact with the family, said AFFornneys.
On Monday, the University Police Department said it would return the phones to the students.
The interim police chief Scott Scheffler wrote in an email to the times that the vote of the city of Los Angeles Atty. The announcement of Hydee Fieldstein Sotos last week that it was not presenting charges against most UCLA and USC students arrested in April and May 2024.
“Until this morning, the phones are no longer bees of bees as evidence,” Scheffler wrote. “People who have not yet collected their phones will be notified and can make an appointment with our copertos unit to do so.”
But students will only have two weeks from the date they receive a written notification from the department to recover their phones before being destroyed, said Cynthia Anderson-Barker, lawyer’s lawyer’s lawyer.
It is a timeline that she says she is unfair to the many students who no longer live in Los Angeles. He requested that a lawyer be allowed to collect the phones on behalf of the students.
She said students would need to bring identification and show evidence that they own the phone. They will also require a notarly letter that if the other wants to collect the device.
The Police Department maintains more than 3,000 elements of evidence, found that property and property are heroes for insurance, according to the department’s website. In general, the elements disturbed as evidence are heroes until a case is completed.
Sabrina Darwish, a criminal defense lawyer with headquarters in Santa Ana, said that she and Anderson-Barker assigned to request the phones from the police department after the May 6 Trials Or more than 40 students within a parking structure in UCLA.
Althegh, the case remained open, no criminal charges were filed against students.
In July, Darwish presented a motion in the Superior Court of Los Angeles for the department to return the property. But the motion was denied due to a search warrant that the University Police had obtained, claiming that the phones were used to commit a serious crime and were part of an investigation into and above.
Two months after the Court hearing, Anderson-Barker wrote Feldstein Soto, copying the mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass, and UCLA’s interim chancellor, Darnell Hunt, who goes back to the phones being returned to the students. Feldstein Sotos’s office responded four days later, stating that the decision to release property fell into the UCLA Police Department.
Hieu Vu, a criminal defense lawyer in Orange County, said it is common for law enforcement agencies to maintain key evidence for a criminal case in some cases for years.
“While a search warrant can temporarily justify property maintenance, it does not allow indefinite possession,” he said. “A retention of a year after a raid order sounds unusually long.”
The lawyers of the lawyers said that trying to return to students have been frustrating.
“We never went back to our two races again,” Darwish said. “They have made it unnecessarily difficult.”
