St. Louis County’s attempt to prosecute a pro-Palestinian protester arrested at Washington University in April 2024 faces a major complication: The student is charged with assaulting a police officer, but WashU campus police officers are not police officers under Missouri law.
That’s the legal argument advanced by attorney Brendan Roediger, who represents Jeron Hicks. The 24-year-old grad student is one of just two people whose cases the St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney agreed to pursue on the university’s behalf. (The other person charged is former Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein.)
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But the cases have proven complicated. They were previously moved from the county to the city circuit court after attorneys pointed out that the incidents in question took place on the city’s portion of WashU’s campus, not the county’s.
And now Roediger believes he’s identified another big flaw.
Two of the three misdemeanor charges against Hicks, he notes, require the state to show that the alleged victim is a “law enforcement officer.” Under Missouri law, a law enforcement officer is a “public servant.”
But WashU has a history of arguing that its campus police are not, in fact, public servants. Take, for example, the case of Wayne vs. Washington University, which the appeals court decided earlier this summer. It was filed on behalf of Robert Wayne, who worked as a WashU campus police officer from 2011 until 2023. After he was fired in October 2023, he argued that his due process rights had been violated. After all, as a law enforcement officer, he had special privileges under Missouri’s Law Enforcement Officers’ Bill of Rights.
WashU, however, argued that the Law Enforcement Officers’ Bill of Rights “applies only to public entities and does not impose obligations on private universities,” according to the Missouri Court of Appeals. The court summarily dismissed Wayne’s lawsuit—and the appeals court upheld that decision.
Or how about the university’s response to Sunshine Law requests filed over the conduct of its campus police department? That response—which Roediger helpfully attached as an exhibit to his motion for dismissal—reads as follows: “The University is not a public governmental body or a quasi-public governmental body. The officers of the Washington University Police Department are private employees, and they are not public servants employed by the state government, any county, or a municipality.”
(A WashU spokesperson said, “WashU police officers are private employees, but they are commissioned by the St. Louis County Police Department and have arrest powers like any other St. Louis County officers.” They pointed us to this link.)
Roediger says the two charges related to law enforcement seem remarkably cut and dried. “Under the criminal code, if you’re going to charge resisting arrest or you’re going to charge someone with assaulting a law enforcement officer, you have to have a law enforcement officer,” he says. “So that’s all easy. Meaning, I don’t think that any lawyer that you talk to who got their mind around this would disagree with me.”
One former chief justice of the Missouri Supreme Court, at least, agrees. Mike Wolff, now a former dean and professor emeritus at Saint Louis University School of Law, tells SLM, “Based out of my first impressions, I think this is a hell of a story.” He agrees that the appellate court decision from July could mean significant problems for the case. “These are all offenses that involve a police officer,” he says. “If you don’t have a police officer at the scene, you can’t prosecute someone for this.”
Roediger notes that the existence of WashU’s campus police force is an anomaly, one that dates back to the anti-war protests that rocked the campus in 1969 and famously led to the burning of an ROTC building. WashU is, he says, the only private university in the state to have its own police force. Other universities have lobbied for bills that would allow them to hire their own, but have never been able to get traction in the legislature.
Yet despite that potentially glaring problem with the first two counts of the case, Hicks may not be home free. As Roediger acknowledges, there is a third count against his client, which alleges that Hicks was trespassing on the WashU campus. (While he originally had a right to be there, the university says that disappeared after police gave orders to disperse, which the university says happened well before that evening’s mass arrests.)
But Roediger believes that charge should be dismissed as well, noting that he’s asked for records related to the case against his client and hasn’t gotten a thing beyond the campus police department’s original probable cause statement. That one may not be so clear-cut; after all, his own law partner, Javad Khazaeli, has been fighting for more than a year to get discovery materials in the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department’s arrest of Bar:PM owner Chad Morris, and only earlier this week did the judge give prosecutors a firm deadline to turn it over.
Roediger filed his motion to dismiss the case on Aug. 5; prosecutors will need to respond in the coming weeks. And a motion filed late Wednesday suggests that, even though the case is now proceeding in the city’s circuit court, it will still be St. Louis County prosecutors handling it. Roediger says he is flabbergasted by the motion, as he’s been dealing with city prosecutors in recent weeks. He says he will vigorously fight any attempt to have the county continue in the case.
“The law has to be that city prosecutors prosecute city cases,” he says, unless a special prosecutor is appointed—and that has not happened here. “Is the Circuit Attorney’s position really that the Benton County prosecutor could file a case that happened on Tucker and Market? We live in a time where that will happen. The AG will even offer to help out.”
Reached by email, St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Melissa Price Smith said her office initially filed the case due to a “mistaken belief” that the incident took place in the city, but later learned that the incident occurred “50 feet within the city of St. Louis across an unmarked city-county line.”
“It is our belief that St. Louis Circuit Attorney Gabe Gore will appoint our office as special prosecutor to prosecute the case in the 22nd Circuit,” she wrote. “We will take up any defense motions before the court.”
