I have spent my career using courts of law to hold terrorists and their financiers accountable. I am, by training and by conviction, a believer in the legal system.

Due process, careful evidence, the discipline of statute and precedent — these are tools I have wielded for decades, and they are tools I trust. Which is why I do not raise concerns about a criminal resolution lightly.

But a recent, shocking plea deal in California demands that concerns be raised.

Pro-Palestinian professor Loay Alnaji was charged in in 2023 connection with the death of 69-year-old Paul Kessler, a Jewish demonstrator killed at a public protest after the October 7 terror attack by Hamas in Israel.

Alnaji recently pleaded guilty in advance of trial as part of a plea deal. The expected sentence is one year in jail, at most, and three years of probation.

On paper, this might appear to be the routine resolution of a criminal case. It is not.

What makes this case extraordinary is not the sentence alone. It is the language in which the court has resolved it. The incident has been characterized as “a dispute that escalated into an accident.” That single phrase carries the weight of the entire judgment. And on the facts, it is deeply inadequate.

Language is not ornament in the law. It is the law’s instrument. The words a court chooses to describe a crime determine how that crime will be remembered, deterred, and judged in every comparable case that follows.

When the death of an elderly Jewish man, struck during a charged public confrontation in a climate of escalating antisemitism, is reduced to a “dispute” and an “accident,” the court has not merely closed a file. It has authored a precedent about what we are prepared to name this kind of violence, and what we are not.

This case did not happen in a vacuum.

Antisemitic incidents in the United States have surged to numbers not seen in modern American memory. Jewish students are harassed on campuses. Jewish institutions are targeted. Jewish identifiers: a kippah, a Star of David, a sign at a public rally, have once again become reasons people calculate their public movements.

American Jews are not asking for special treatment. They are asking that the obvious context of the violence directed at them not be quietly excised from the record.

To recognize context is not to abandon legal standards. It is the opposite.

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Every prosecutor knows that intent, motive, and circumstance are not optional flourishes — they are the substance of what separates manslaughter from murder, accident from assault, private grievance from public harm.

The argument is not that every troubling incident must be charged as a hate crime. The argument is narrower and more important: where context is plainly relevant, it cannot be quietly set aside for the sake of expediency.

When a justice system selects language that softens the contours of a hate-tinged killing, it does three things at once. It denies the victim’s family the dignity of an honest accounting. It signals to those weighing similar acts that the price may be modest. And it tells communities watching from the outside that their fear is more than they should expect the state to share.

At Shurat HaDin, we have litigated against terror financiers, foreign regimes, and the architects of mass violence in American courts, Israeli courts, and international tribunals. The lesson is the same in every jurisdiction. When violence connected to hatred is renamed into something smaller, the violence does not shrink. It grows.

Minimization is not de-escalation. It is invitation.

No single case defines a justice system. But certain cases reveal where a system is straining, where the gap between the facts on the ground and the words chosen to describe them has become too wide to ignore. The Kessler case is one of those.

Paul Kessler is dead. He was 69. He went to a public demonstration in his own country, defending his beliefs, and he did not come home. The man responsible will serve approximately one year, at most.

And the court has called it an accident.

Justice must be done. It must also be named. If we cannot bring ourselves to do the second, the first begins to fail us.

Nitsana Darshan-Leitner is an Israeli attorney who founded Shurat HaDin, which represents terror victims.