Justice Gerald Lebovits, an adjunct professor at Columbia Law School, said the expulsions were ‘arbitrary and capricious’
The New York Supreme Court ordered Columbia University to reverse disciplinary action against approximately two dozen student radicals who stormed and occupied a campus building in late April 2024, arguing that the Ivy League university illegally relied on sealed arrest records.
The judge, New York State Supreme Court justice Gerald Lebovits, said in a ruling issued Friday that the sanctions against the students, which included suspensions, expulsions, and degree revocations, were “arbitrary and capricious,” arguing that even if the arrest records were admissible, they established only that the students were present inside Hamilton Hall during the occupation.
“The record did not, however, contain evidence that [students] themselves acted to endanger Hamilton Hall or University property within Hamilton,” Lebovits wrote.
The students’ arrest records were sealed after Soros-backed Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg dropped trespassing charges against them. At the time, in June 2024, prosecutors argued that the students should get a pass because they did not have criminal histories and would face discipline at Columbia.
The students had challenged their expulsions under something known as an Article 78 proceeding, under which judges can review whether state agencies—or, in this case, university administrative and disciplinary bodies—have applied their own rules in an evenhanded manner. Lebovits said Columbia had not, because—among other reasons—it could not distinguish between varying levels of involvement and culpability among the students, thanks in part to their use of masks and keffiyehs and destruction of security cameras.
The university can either appeal the ruling by Lebovits, who also serves as a Columbia Law School adjunct professor, or work to discipline the students relying on different evidence.
A spokesman for the university told the Washington Free Beacon that “Columbia is reviewing the Court’s ruling from last Friday. The order does not take effect for at least 30 days, and no student who was disciplined for the occupation of Hamilton Hall can return to campus at this time. Columbia is considering all of its options, including seeking a stay of the order and appealing the decision.”
But the school didn’t hand down disciplinary sentences until March 2025, nearly a year after the incident and about a week after the Trump administration slashed over $400 million in grant funding to the school, citing its inadequate response to the explosion of anti-Semitism on campus in the wake of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist rampage. At that time, the students’ arrest records were sealed.
The students and professional activists who broke into the building occupied it for 22 hours, holding a janitor captive, shattering windows, covering security cameras, and dragging chairs and metal tables to barricade themselves inside. They renamed the academic building “Hind’s Hall” and refused to leave until then-president Minouche Shafik authorized the NYPD to forcibly remove them.
The students included Columbia’s graduate student union president Grant Miner; Franziska Lee, an organizer with the Columbia Revolutionary Marxist Students Organization; Eloise Maybank; Marianne Almero; Rose Bottorf; and Sebastian Jimenez.
Lebovits has served as a New York City judge since 2001. He teaches two courses at Columbia Law School and supervises a judicial internship program that places students at the state Supreme Court. He was nominated to the court by the New York County Democratic Party in 2025 and donated $100 to Rep. Jerry Nadler (D., N.Y.) in 2024, according to campaign finance records reviewed by the Free Beacon.
One of the student activists expelled for storming Hamilton Hall, Aidan Parisi, wrote Sunday on X, “What a crazy way to find out that I will be unexpelled within 30 days.”
Parisi, the son of longtime State Department official Elizabeth Daugharty, was a leader of the illegal encampment that plagued Columbia’s campus for weeks in April 2024. He was suspended following his involvement in a campus event organized by Columbia University Apartheid Diversity, which featured a member of the designated terrorist organization Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and the Israeli-designated terrorist organization Samidoun, a PFLP fundraiser designated a “sham charity” by the Treasury Department’s Office for Foreign Assets Control.
Parisi refused to vacate Columbia housing for weeks after he was suspended, sounding off against the university in Instagram posts in which he showed off his long, painted nails and said at the time he was “fighting his eviction” because he was having difficulties finding housing that would accommodate his “emotional support rabbit.”