E-Mail This Article to a Friend FOLLOW-UP Charges dropped against UMass professor BY KRISTEN LOMBARDI

Chalk one up for free speech in the pro-war, pro-USA era. Earlier this week, prosecutors at the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office essentially dropped the criminal charges in the high-profile case against UMass Boston professor Tony Van Der Meer (see "Climate of Fear," News and Features, July 25). On December 15, at a hearing at the Dorchester Municipal Court, prosecutors filed a motion for a "pretrial probation agreement" that would effectively end the case. According to the agreement, "the Commonwealth ... moves to place the defendant on a pretrial probation period for two months." If Van Der Meer does nothing to occasion his arrest in the next 60 days, the two charges currently pending against him — assault and battery against a police officer, and resisting arrest — will be dismissed.

In short, in the words of the Africana-studies professor, "Everything is over."

Last April — at the height of the US invasion of Iraq — Van Der Meer was arrested for allegedly assaulting a UMass Boston police officer after engaging in a heated argument with an Army National Guard recruiter who had come to the campus that day. Van Der Meer took issue with the guardsman after hearing the man threaten one of his students for passing out pamphlets with an anti-war message. Within minutes, Van Der Meer found himself on the ground, under arrest, and facing allegations that he had "shoved" a campus cop in the chest.

When Van Der Meer found out about the agreement this week, he didn’t necessarily breathe a sigh of relief. The word "probation," he says, "alarmed me," especially since he and a dozen or so eyewitnesses to the April 3 incident have long disputed the campus police’s version of events and insisted that Van Der Meer was innocent. Standing before a Dorchester Court judge last Monday, Van Der Meer felt "cautious" about the sudden turn of events in his case. "I’m not a lawyer," he says, "and when you’re black in America, you tend to be suspicious about the law." Still, in his rational moments, he sees the prosecutors’ offer to make a deal as vindication. "Without a doubt," he says.

David Procopio, the spokesperson for Suffolk County DA Dan Conley, confirmed the details of the agreement for the Phoenix. On Wednesday morning, according to Procopio, the Dorchester Court judge formally accepted the two-month probationary period. Barring any new arrests of Van Der Meer, the charges against him will be officially dismissed in February. On the flip side, of course, is the fact that if the professor is arrested for any reason during this two-month probation, Procopio says, "the charges remain intact and the case gets put back on track for trial."

When asked why the DA Office’s made the agreement, Procopio replies, "We believe the allegations in this case, supported by evidence, were serious enough to warrant some sort of formal disposition before the court. When we reviewed the facts in their totality, including the circumstances surrounding the assault and the defendant’s lack of any prior convictions, we determined that the resolution through pretrial probation was in the interest of justice."

Now that the criminal case is one step short of closure, Van Der Meer will try to address the unresolved issues surrounding his arrest. That the guardsman who threatened Naro and who initiated the incident has never faced any disciplinary action strikes the professor as "outrageous." He’s considering a possible lawsuit against the National Guard. "It’s absurd for the National Guard to have made me out to be a terrorist threat, and then nothing happens."

In the meantime, Van Der Meer sees his experience as fodder for a book on free-speech issues in wartime. His ordeal, after all, is just one example of the kind of repression that those who voice dissent now face. As he puts it, "As long as Bush is in power, as [long as] the Patriot Act exists, free speech is still very much in jeopardy."