> The jury found Greenpeace USA liable for almost all claims.
how does this happen? did greenepeace just run a bad trial? or lose all public trust?
The more tenuous thing here is proving Greenpeace incited people to do that. Without having seen the evidence, I’m guessing there were internal documents that were bad for Greenpeace. Activist organizations sometimes adopt pretty militant rhetoric in an effort to get protesters fired up. I bet these internal documents could seem sinister to a jury of ordinary people.
The legal issue here is that there should be a very high bar for saying that first amendment protected speech amounts to incitement. But that’s not a principle of law as far as I’m aware. So any organization that adopts this militant posture for marketing reasons (which is a lot of them these days) could run the risk of that being used against them if any of the protesters end up damaging or destroying property.
I'm not sure what they were expecting. Direct action agains an oil pipeline in ND is gonna go over about as well as direct action tourism in Florida. If by some miracle you get a judge sympathetic to your cause you won't get a jury that is. The local people want this industry, generally speaking.
The frozen plains of North Dakota aren’t worth much without oil. With oil, they provide good paying jobs to people who otherwise won’t have them.
I lived in the next state south for many years. Oil is definitely popular with the people of North Dakota.
I loved the winters. I loved the people. I loved how its natural beauty was subtle and rewarded the patient, unlike El Capitan or the Black Hills. The economy was fine before oil appeared.
Does it sound surprising to you that it was perfectly normal to rent a perfect acceptable two bedroom apartment in a safe town on the interstate for $300 a month and still easily find dignified, decent paying jobs without 1000 applications?
I've lived in many cities and work in tech now, and I can confidently say that, as it concerns the professions and jobs that unambiguously sustain and improve life, no community on the planet was more productive than my home state. There is more to the story than some shale.
Snort another line while you're at it.
My pet theory based on personal observation is that there's a strong inverse correlation between nature trying to destroy your shit and insufferable people.
I don't understand the distinction you're making here. Isn't there being a high bar for saying that first amendment protected speech amounts to incitement literally a principle of modern first amendment law (Brandenburg etc)?
> So any organization that adopts this militant posture for marketing reasons (which is a lot of them these days) could run the risk of that being used against them if any of the protesters end up damaging or destroying property.
Even the way you write this makes it sound like you know it's problematic too.
> Even the way you write this makes it sound like you know it's problematic too.
That was intentional.
Decades and centuries from now our descendants will be dealing with the consequences of the destroyed climate and wonder why we punished the only people who tried to do something about it while justifying it by "the laws".
We live under law or we die under anarchy.
Clearly the 'drill-baby-drill' crowd doesn't like Greenpeace at all and is doing what they can to muzzle activists because they know that if they manage to squelch Greenpeace then many lesser funded organizations will not be able to do anything all all. But history doesn't give a damn about any of that.
The hyper-local point of that is how my buddies haven't taken grinders to the flock cameras because there is a local de-flocked group who is trying to exhaust legal actions before moving on to other options. But it's not like that kind of direct action is thought of as unethical by a lot of us, even if it's legibly illegal.
And regardless of what a person thinks about the direct action, the (very separate) idea that these larger, legal, above-ground groups are what keep folks who have very strong "feelings" from acting is a position held by folks on all sides of these things. That strategy seems central to the neo-liberal method of dealing with social unrest.
In that ecosystem, if you kill off the big NGOs you might see a thousand tiny and headless ELFs bloom.
If the post-neo-liberal (god what a shitty turn of phrase, sorry) strategy looks like "ICE", then good luck to them; the 3000:100000 ratio didn't go well in Minneapolis and as more folks start looking at how we didn't have a winter at all where I live (it's 65 degrees this week at almost 7000' in SW Colorado and the ground frost has broken) then that strategy might be subjected to reality.
So, whose law do you find so precious that you're willing to die in anarchy for?
P.S.: Laws are actually more like new years resolutions for a society; you gotta follow through with eating the rich (enforcement), or else you get a bad case of conventus secretus which may eventually lead to acute homines fascistae
> A Morton County jury on Wednesday ordered Greenpeace to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to the developer of the Dakota Access Pipeline, finding that the environmental group incited illegal behavior by anti-pipeline protesters and defamed the company.
> The nine-person jury delivered a verdict in favor of Energy Transfer on most counts, awarding more than $660 million in damages to Energy Transfer and Dakota Access LLC.
It seems like the jury did its job on the evidence presented.
Overall, they could not make the showing necessary.
I read the motions and responses, and was not particularly impressed with their arguments for change of venue.
The judge might allow it, but the odds are long and the next judge will certainly allow an appeal on those grounds so you probably don't even gain much except time.
If you do something slimy like dismiss a huge fraction of the juror pool because you don't like their demographics (vs for example having to dismiss the half of the population that had their opinion biased by the news or some other non-slimy reason to cause the same outcome) there will be an appeal and that appeal will be presided over by a judge.
Edit: and considering this was the Southwest district, looking at results by county, 75% seems about right. This isn’t necessarily a biased jury in the sense that selection was unfair, this is probably the makeup you’d get with a fair selection. https://apnews.com/projects/election-results-2024/north-dako...
It can be quite hard to get a jury to go against a locally powerful large employer in a small town.
It's telling that "trump" buildings rebranded in NYC...
Convicting Trump doesn't throw half of NYC onto the dole, either.
One group finds candidate who defrauds more then any other politician before appealing and right kind manly. They see him sexually harassing women appealing. Moreover all fascists vote for Trump. Both sides have bad people in ... but Trump side is defined by them.
There is no symetry here. This particular choice is literally showing that yes, you are more likely to be unfair kind of juror.
(Note well: I haven't been following this case closely enough to say. But you should at least consider that as a possibility.)
i'm specifically responding to your use of the word "justice" and how those two do not always align - it's a lack of precise definition, or a disagreement in terms. this is one of the clearest examples of that phenomenon that exists, especially when you consider the lengths the fossil fuel industry has gone to hide and misdirect evidence of the negative environmental impacts of their business model.
I believe it's a question of "who is found liable" and then "what is the damages" and then the damages are split between those who are found liable.
If it was Greenpeace and {Some Org} that were both found liable, then that could be split 90% {Some Org} and 10% Greenpeace.
However, if only Greenpeace was found liable it would be 100% Greenpeace despite how little interaction they had.
To keep the dissenting voices quiet and to scare other groups from protesting.
Modus operandi for many industries.
In environmental circles, Greenpeace is very well-known to be traitors working with big corporations to launder their image. They're opposed to sabotage and revolutionary tactics. Their activities are mostly fundraising and legal proceedings, and on the rare instance they perform so-called civil disobedience (such as deploying banners on nuclear plants), it is in very orderly fashion that doesn't provide much economic harm.
As a left-wing environmentalist, i wish such a strong voice as Greenpeace was capable to incite people to rise against the greedy corporations destroying our planet. I just don't see that happening, neither here in France nor in the USA.
The point is to shut people up. Lawyers don't like filing literally frivolous suits, that type of activity gets you disbarred.
Many years ago in Northern CA we had a lawyer that was basically going around filing suits against everyone she came in contact with as a way to pay the bills. She was eventually declared a "vexatious litigant" and had to get a judge's permission before she could sue anyone in the future, but they didn't disbar her.
She might lose a lawsuit in summary dismissal, but the defendant is going to be out thousands of dollars by the time that happens. Anyway, the goal was never to go to court in any of her filings. What she wanted was to bully people into paying a settlement, since that meant she didn't have to pay any court fees.
Unfortunately North Dakota is one of the minority of states without anti-SLAPP laws.
> how does this happen? did greenepeace just run a bad trial? or lose all public trust?
Alternative possibility: they were actually guilty. Seems likely. The idea that Greenpeace was intentionally spreading misinformation doesn't require a big leap of faith.
Companies and people can.
I think that's not what the article is saying, although I read it that way too at first. Greenpeace USA, the organization whose six employees were on the ground, was found liable for "almost all claims"; it's only Greenpeace International and Greenpeace Fund, their sibling organizations, who were found not to be "responsible for the alleged on-the-ground harms committed by protesters".
Why is something like this allowed to exist... Stacking entities and funneling wealth around in the guise of a noble cause.
Fun fact, Monster Cables owns no patents or IP (or effectively none), it just licenses them all from the "wholly independent, arms-length" Monster Cables Bermuda, Inc. entity.
Energy Transfer had previously attempted other suits which failed to get any traction because the claims are essentially Trump-style conspiracy theories about who is "pulling the strings" and "paying for" a massive decentralized protest movement. But they got lucky on this one. One of the advantages of having so much money you can just burn it on questionable lawsuits until one succeeds.
They were never going to win the trial. More than half of the jury pool had ties to the pipeline industry. They were always going to find against Greenpeace, and they went to fairly extreme lengths to ignore the evidence presented to come up with a ridiculous damage award far in excess of the company's actual damages (even accounting for a punitive damage markup).
Will they win on appeal? Maybe pre-Trump they had a chance, but right-wing judges no longer feel bound by the law, reason, or equity.