A St. Louis judge has ordered the arrest of three-time Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein after she failed to show up for a court hearing tied to a misdemeanor case stemming from a Washington University protest more than two years ago. Judge Karma Johnson issued the failure-to-appear warrant even though prosecutors on hand for the 9 a.m. hearing had asked that no warrant be issued.
The hearing, which required all counsel and parties, including Stein herself, to appear in person, went forward without her, according to St. Louis Magazine. Ryan Krull, a staff writer for the outlet, reported that Johnson told those present in Division 25 that there will be a failure-to-appear warrant for Ms. Stein. A co-defendant in a related case, Joseph Welch, also missed the hearing, per the same report.
Stein, 76, faces misdemeanor assault and trespass charges connected to her arrest at a pro-Palestine demonstration on Washington University's Danforth Campus on April 24, 2024, when the protest concerned the war in Gaza. Police arrested more than 100 people at that encampment, according to the report, and university figures cited by TIME confirmed that 23 of those arrested were current students and four were university employees.
What Prosecutors Say Happened
Police accused Stein of grabbing one officer's bicycle and kicking another officer multiple times, according to media reports cited by St. Louis Magazine. Formal charging documents filed in March 2025 alleged she hit an officer with a bicycle during a campus struggle and kicked the officer multiple times in the right leg and groin, according to KSDK. Washington University officials reported that three police officers were injured in the encampment clearing, suffering a severe concussion, a broken finger, and a groin injury, per TIME.
Stein has denied the allegations. After her release from roughly six hours in custody at the St. Louis County jail in April 2024, she said officers shoved a bicycle against her and threw her onto her head, and insisted she never assaulted anyone, the station reported at the time. Photographer Zachary Linhares captured images of Stein at the protest that day.
St. Louis County prosecutors reviewed 19 applications for criminal charges stemming from the demonstration but chose to formally charge only Stein and a second protester, Jeron Hicks, because their cases specifically alleged physical assaults on officers; the other 17 cases were referred to municipal court, KSDK reported. Hicks, who was 24 when first charged, faced three misdemeanors — first-degree trespass, assaulting a police officer, and resisting arrest — after allegedly spitting on a campus police lieutenant and refusing to walk while detained. Public court filings no longer show his case, and the charges against him appear to have been dropped, according to St. Louis Magazine.
A Case That Crossed the City-County Line
Stein's case originated in St. Louis County Circuit Court but was transferred to St. Louis City Circuit Court because the alleged assault took place across the city-county line, per the report. It is still handled by St. Louis County prosecutors despite the venue change. The transfer added another layer of complexity to a prosecution already reshaped by a recusal: St. Louis Circuit Attorney Gabe Gore pulled his office from cases connected to the protest because his wife worked as a WashU administrator involved in handling student issues, a conflict that led to the appointment of special prosecutors, as reported by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Johnson, who presides over Division 25, was sworn in as an associate circuit judge in April 2026, according to the 22nd Judicial Circuit Court. Under Missouri Revised Statutes Section 544.665, a defendant who willfully fails to appear after being released on a criminal summons or bond for a misdemeanor faces an additional criminal offense punishable by fines or confinement, according to Justia Law's rendering of the statute. That framework allows judges to issue arrest warrants for failure to appear regardless of what prosecutors themselves prefer.
An Uncertain Path Forward
The warrant is unlikely to have an immediate practical effect if Stein is currently outside Missouri, St. Louis Magazine reported. It remains unclear whether Stein will voluntarily surrender or attempt to have the warrant quashed, and whether her defense will challenge the authority of the campus officers who arrested her in the first place. Attorney Brendan Roediger has argued that Washington University's campus police officers are not police officers under Missouri law, and the university has separately advanced that same argument in unrelated litigation, according to the report.
Stein ran for president as the Green Party's nominee in 2012, 2016, and 2024, and describes herself as a self-described eco-socialist. In the November 2024 election, she received 17,135 votes in Missouri, or 0.6% of the statewide total, according to Ballotpedia. How — or whether — the warrant is resolved now depends largely on what happens next in Judge Johnson's courtroom.
