SANTA ANA – A jury Friday found 10 Muslim university students guilty of disrupting a speech by an Israeli diplomat at UC Irvine last year, in a case that focused on free speech.

Superior Court Judge Peter Wilson sentenced each student to three years of probation, which would be cut to a year if each completes 56 hours of community service by Jan. 31. He also ordered them to pay $270 in fines.

Wilson said jail time was not warranted because evidence showed the students were “motivated by their beliefs and did not disrupt for the sake of disrupting.”

The jury of six men and six women deliberated about two days before finding the students guilty on one count each of misdemeanor disturbing a public meeting and conspiracy in connection with the Feb. 8, 2010, talk by Michael Oren, the Israeli ambassador to the United States.

“We’re delighted the jury saw this the same way we saw it,” Assistant District Attorney Dan Wagner said.

Wagner argued the defendants used a “heckler’s veto” to thwart the free-speech rights of the speaker, while the defense attorneys contended the protesters lawfully exercised their right to free speech.

The jury disagreed.

Jurors bolted from the courtroom via a back door escorted by several sheriff’s deputies and declined to answer questions from reporters.

Defense attorney Dan Stormer said he was honored to represent the students but disappointed in the verdict.

“You cannot convict people in this country based on the content of their speech,” he said. “That’s one of the basic principles of our society.”

Wagner argued it would not have mattered if the defendants had read from the phone book or shouted “Mickey Mouse” during Oren’s speech, because it was their conduct, not the content, that forced the ambassador off the stage.

Stormer and other attorneys said in a news conference afterward that they would appeal the convictions on constitutional grounds.

Some members of the audience gasped, while a few started crying as the verdict was read.

The defendants, eight of whom were present, and their attorneys huddled in a circle in court right after the jury was dismissed. They talked softly.

As the students streamed out afterward, they were hugged by supporters and family members.

“I believe in the system, but I don’t know what’s going on with the system,” said Sahar Abdel-Aziz of Irvine, who attended the trial daily.

One of the students, Asaad Traina, 20, who’s starting work on a master’s in biotech at UC Irvine, said he handled the trial and the spotlight with patience.

“The time that it really hit me was when … the verdict was announced and my mother was in the courtroom and she just burst into tears; that was the first time that I really felt like, I guess, I was sorry that my family had to be put through this,” he said.

Shalom Elcott, president and chief executive officer of the Jewish Federation & Family Services, Orange County, one of the sponsors of Oren’s UCI talk, said in a statement:

“The verdict reaffirms that the Muslim Student Union’s planned and systematic use of disruptions to trample on the free speech of others crossed the moral, social and intellectual line of civility and tolerance. While we accept the right and requirement of a public institution to provide an unfettered forum for diverse points of view, we do not, nor will we ever, support ‘hate speech.’ “

District Attorney Tony Rackauckas said this at a news conference: “Today, an Orange County jury sent what I believe to be a strong message that First Amendment rights belong to everybody, and we will not tolerate a small group of wanting to shut down speeches on a campus or anyplace.”

Supporters of the “Irvine 11” labeled the verdicts “a travesty of justice” at a separate news conference.

“It’s a tragic and disgraceful day in the history of Orange County,” said Rev. Wilfredo Benítez, who serves as rector of St. Anselm of Canterbury Episcopal Church in Garden Grove. “This attack against Muslim students and the Muslim community is an attack against democracy; it’s an attack on all of us.”

Prosecutors have said all along and reiterated they did not target a certain group.

“It’s not Islamophobic; it’s not against or for any particular group,” Rackauckas said. “This is strictly about the rule of law and not allowing one group to shut down another. And, if it was the opposite and it was an Israeli group shutting down a Muslim group, we’d do exactly the same thing.”

After months of pretrial motions, the trial lasted eight days, including about two days spent on closing arguments by one prosecutor and six defense attorneys earlier this week.

Wagner told jurors that the protesters’ actions amounted to censorship when they planned to disrupt Oren and tried to cover it up.

The right to free speech is not absolute, he said, and it does not include canceling out the speech of others.

“If heckler’s veto was allowed, then no one would have the right to free speech,” he said. “Freedom does not mean that no one can tell me what I can do. That’s not freedom; that’s anarchy.”

The prosecutor urged jurors not to buy into the “alternate reality” created by the defense, saying the defendants “convicted themselves.”

Attorneys for the students – seven from UC Irvine and three from UC Riverside – said their clients intentionally disrupted the speech, but they believed they were conducting a peaceful protest that did not break laws.

Both sides saw some of the same evidence presented at trial through different lenses.

Defense attorney Jacqueline Goodman referred to the students as “heroes” who acted in the “tradition of the finest American political activists.”

Prosecutors disagree.

“They’re not being civil rights heroes, they’re actually being an opposite of that,” Rackauckas said. “They’re trying to stop somebody from exercising their civil rights.”

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Contact the writer: 714-834-3773 or vjolly@ocregister.com