After a four-hour hearing yesterday, the students who protested at the Osmond Building in July are closer to getting a decision about whether Penn State will formally punish them.

They won't get a verdict for another week, at the earliest. The hearing started late and exceeded its time limit. The rest of it is scheduled to begin at 8:30 a.m. Thursday.

The three students — Justin Leto, Robyn Stephens and Michelle Yates — are all charged with violating university rules. The university has accused them of failing to follow police orders to leave a balcony during a demonstration against the National Governors' Association Annual Meeting on July 10.

The students said they were allowed to be on the balcony and the police violated their First Amendment right to hold a peaceful demonstration.

Police arrested the students in July but criminal charges against them were dismissed several days later.

Their university's charges against them are not serious enough to warrant a full review board of Judicial Affairs officers. Instead, one trained judicial affairs volunteer is in charge of the hearing, which is the students' final level of appeal.

The most severe punishment the students could face is probation, Penn State spokesman Bill Mahon said Wednesday.

The hearing officer, Housing and Food Services Director Fred Fotis, said yesterday that he wanted to hear witnesses on the side of the students before he made his decision.

Before the hearing, about 30 students and faculty signed a petition insisting that they be let into the hearing.

Judicial Affairs officials told them the hearing room was too small to accommodate them all and declined to move it to another room.

The hearing was only open to the students' academic advisers and five observers, including a Daily Collegian reporter the students invited.

Since July, the students have been sharing details of their case with the news media.

Only a few new items came out of the hearing, which dealt mostly with the procedure of applying to hang a sign on the Osmond Building.

Leto continued to say that he and the protesters had permission, as well as a constitutional right, to demonstrate at the building on July 10.

But two university witnesses said Leto's application to hang a banner on the building was never cleared by the university. The form was rejected, they said, in part because Leto tried to reserve space all over the campus to accommodate 10,000 demonstrators. On top of that, Leto only filled out the form to include dates through July 9, the witnesses said.

The students, meanwhile, continued to challenge the fairness of the court, at times objecting when they were unable to ask questions they wanted witnesses to answer.

As time began to run out, Fotis limited the students to talking only about their specific charges.

As they have in the past, the three students said law enforcement officials were spying on them during the NGA meeting, reading their e-mails and trying to silence their opinions.