Greenpeace must pay millions over Dakota pipeline protests, says jury

[previously posted on a dupe]

“The problems included a jury that was patently biased in favor of Energy Transfer, with many members working in the fossil fuel industry; a judge who lacked the requisite experience and legal knowledge to rule properly on the complex First Amendment and other evidentiary issues at the center of the case; and incendiary and prejudicial statements by lawyers for Energy Transfer that tried to criminalize Greenpeace and by extension the entire climate movement by attacking constitutionally-protected advocacy.”

“In my six decades of legal practice, I have never witnessed a trial as unfair as the one against Greenpeace that just ended in the courts of North Dakota. This is one of the most important cases in American history.”

https://www.trialmonitors.org/statement-of-independent-trial...

More details about the actual defamation claims here:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2025/03/1...

North Dakota government is corrupt so none of this surprised me.

Free polite speech has rarely been enough to have meaningful results. In the USA, you can thank the Boston Tea Party, heck the American Revolution, for political change, and lots of civil violence in order to get a 2-day weekend and a more-or-less 40-hour work week. The Tea Partiers that the Koch brothers funded that disrupted orderly speech became Maga and run Biden campaign buses off the road, that's been effective too.