Two of the remaining people facing charges in the toppling of the Confederate statue known as Silent Sam saw their charges dismissed by the court system this week.

According to a report from The News & Observer on Wednesday, the charges for Raul Arce Jimenez and Shawn Birchfield-Finn were dropped due to the local court system working to prioritize certain cases amid limitations caused by COVID-19, Orange-Chatham District Attorney Jim Woodall told the newspaper. Jimenez and Birchfield-Finn were appealing their convictions on the charges as decided in 2019.

The Orange County Courthouse has been closed several times over the past year due to the pandemic due to state public health guidelines and localized outbreaks of the coronavirus — including most recently in October 2020.

“We’re not in control of COVID-19 and we’ve had no control over the fact that we’ve had court shut down, and realistically, it will be months and months before we ever get to these cases, and we simply have to prioritize,” Woodall told the News & Observer.

Jimenez and Birchfield-Finn were among more than a dozen people charged after the Confederate monument was pulled down in August 2018. The pair were charged with with injury to real property, misdemeanor riot and defacing a public statue or monument.

District Court Judge Lunsford Long convicted Jimenez and Birchfield-Finn of all three charges in 2019 and and sentenced them to 24 hours in jail. Scott Holmes, the attorney representing the pair, appealed the case to Superior Court and requested a jury trial, which delayed the sentence. Holmes said he received an email on Tuesday notifying him that the cases had been dismissed.

“I’m very pleased. I’m glad they did it,” Holmes told the News & Observer.

After Silent Sam was pulled down by protesters, it was placed in storage by UNC. In November 2019, a court approved a consent judgement that gave possession of the statue over to the Sons of Confederate Veterans. Under the terms, UNC was also tasked with funding a $2.5 million charitable trust for expenses related to the care and preservation of the monument.

Following criticism regarding the settlement and a revisit of the case, an Orange County judge returned possession of the statue was returned to UNC and voided the $2.5 million payment to the pro-Confederate group.

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