The Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office is dismissing misdemeanor “theft of advertising services” charges against two Northwestern University students for allegedly wrapping an imitation front page around real copies of The Daily Northwestern newspaper in October.
In an emailed statement, the office wrote that prosecutors decided to dismiss the charges after they “thoroughly reviewed the circumstances” and discussed it with both Northwestern and Students Publishing Co., which owns and publishes the student newspaper.
“Our criminal justice system should only be utilized when there is no other recourse for accountability,” the statement reads. “Northwestern University and campus police are fully equipped to hold the involved individuals accountable, ensuring that such matters are handled in a manner that is both appropriate to the educational context and respectful of students’ rights.”
Northwestern spokesperson Jon Yates wrote in an email that the university “supports the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office, which has used its discretion to drop charges against the two individuals.”
The dismissal comes less than a day after SPC board Chair John Byrne announced that the board had hired legal counsel to intercede to seek the dismissal of the charges. He wrote that the board did not realize reporting the incident to University Police and signing complaint forms would result in the State’s Attorney’s Office pursuing criminal charges.
“We were asked to sign ‘complaints’ against those two individuals, presumably as part of the investigation,” Byrne wrote. “We didn’t understand how these complaints started a process that we could no longer control … we were never informed by the State’s Attorney’s Office that these people would be charged – and we were not asked whether we even wanted them to be charged.”
Daily Northwestern Editor-in-Chief Avani Kalra sent a statement from the paper’s editorial board to the RoundTable via email. “The Daily Northwestern’s Editorial Board is pleased to see that the State’s Attorney’s office has dropped the charges against our peers,” the statement reads. “We are looking forward to getting back to covering our community and serving our fellow students.”
Byrne and the attorney for the two students did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The RoundTable is not publishing the students’ names.
Intense backlash for charges
The two students were accused of creating and printing a leaflet imitating The Daily’s front page and wrapping it around real copies of the newspaper’s Oct. 23, 2023, print edition in various campus news boxes on Oct. 25. The leaflet concerned the ongoing Israel-Hamas war and featured a photo of a Palestinian hospital news conference held amid dead bodies and content accusing the university of being “complicit in genocide of Palestinians.”
Theft of advertising services is defined as when someone “attaches or inserts an unauthorized advertisement in a newspaper or periodical” without the consent of the paper’s publisher or distributor, and is a Class A misdemeanor with a sentence of up to a year in jail and a $2,500 fine. The charge only appears to exist in Illinois and California, and both versions were created in response to white supremacist groups attempting to recruit members by placing literature in unrelated newspapers.
The charges were submitted in November 2023, and began attracting attention and backlash in February. A collection of student organizations and other campus community members published letters to the editor in The Daily and student magazine North by Northwestern calling on SPC to request prosecutors drop the charges, and The Daily’s student editors published an editorial objecting to the charges on Monday.
“The editorial board cannot support the criminal prosecution of our peers,” the student editorial reads. “Our newspaper has always prided itself on its commitment to informing and supporting students, and we believe our publisher should play no part in perpetrating harm against the communities we aim to serve.”
Editor’s note: Reporter Alex Harrison signed a group letter from Daily Northwestern alumni to SPC urging the board to request the charges be dismissed. Also, this story has been updated to include a new statement from The Daily Northwestern’s editorial board.
It is right and just that criminal charges against these NWU students were dropped. Nevertheless, NWU has a responsibility to impose consequences on these students for inflammatory behavior that goes beyond a mere prank or spoof.
As I understand it, the First Amendment right to free speech applies to governmental entities, not to private institutions like NWU, which have their own enforceable codes of conduct. As an aside, acknowledging this would have spared several college presidents their jobs recently, by not hemming and hawing that some objectionable student behavior at their institutions “depends on the context.”
Even if the First Amendment did apply to NWU, the Constitution still limits its scope of free speech protections in the form of the dictum by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., who said, “You can’t yell fire in a crowded theater,” because that would create panic and chaos, likely leading to injury and death. Creating a hoax newspaper cover that ignites passions about a current controversial international crisis is not the same as lampooning a political figure or celebrity in the name of harmless fun. In the current political climate it’s a potentially dangerous act, and should come with penalties at the University level.