The opening week of the landmark trial of Greenpeace in a multimillion-dollar lawsuit by Energy Transfer over the Dakota Access Pipeline protests did not bode well for the defense.
Lawyers for Greenpeace said so themselves in a petition filed in North Dakota’s Supreme Court. They asked the court on Thursday to move the trial out of Morton County, arguing the jury is not impartial. Daily life was disrupted there for nearly a year, in 2016 and 2017, by protesters heading toward the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, just south of the county line.
The protests against construction of the pipeline, which since 2017 has carried oil from North Dakota across several states to Illinois, garnered international attention, attracted thousands of people and, at times, led to violent clashes.
The company that built the pipeline, Energy Transfer, first filed the lawsuit against Greenpeace in 2019. The suit accuses the environmental group of playing a key role in protests that delayed pipeline construction, as well as attacking workers and equipment and defaming Energy Transfer.
Greenpeace, one of the world’s most widely known environmental groups, says it played only a minor role in the protests, in support of Native American activists, and that the organization promotes nonviolence.
Lawyers for Greenpeace said the jury-selection process showed that the county court had erred in denying its previous motions to move the trial to the bigger city of Fargo. “With jury selection complete, it is clearer now than ever that Greenpeace Defendants will not get a fair and impartial trial in the county where the protests occurred,” they wrote in the motion.
If Greenpeace were to lose the lawsuit, a judgment could amount to hundreds of millions of dollars and force it to shut down operations in the United States.
The motion also pointed to newspapers that had been sent to Morton County residents in recent months containing negative articles about the protests. The three Greenpeace entities named in the lawsuit said in their petition to the State Supreme Court that they believe the newspapers “may have emanated from plaintiffs or from someone closely connected to them.”
Energy Transfer did not immediately respond to a request for comment about whether it was connected to the mailed newspapers.
As of Sunday afternoon, the court had not responded to the petition. The trial is scheduled to last five weeks.
Testimony began Wednesday in the courthouse in Mandan, N.D., just across the Missouri River from Bismarck, the capital. The protests took place about a 45-minute drive south.
The case is being heard by Judge James D. Gion, who is normally based in neighboring Stark County. Morton County’s judges had recused themselves, noting that they were “acquainted with the plaintiff/defendant, and feel that in the best interest of justice should disqualify themselves,” according to court documents.
Energy Transfer began to call witnesses on Wednesday.
Joey Mahmoud, who was a vice president at Energy Transfer overseeing Dakota Access, testified that the pipeline serves a crucial purpose in bringing oil from the Bakken fields of western North Dakota to refineries in the Midwest and beyond. The pipeline construction came amid a historic boom in fracked oil from the area that helped lead the United States to become the world’s biggest oil producer.
The protests against the project from the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and its allies escalated in spring 2016, he testified. Tribal leaders said the project went through burial sites and other sacred land and that its construction would endanger the tribe’s water supply.
The company countered it had hired experts to survey the route and argued that those claims were unsupported. It also said pipelines were a safer way to transport oil than trucks or rail.
Energy Transfer’s lawyers also called the county sheriff to the stand and showed video depositions of former Greenpeace employees. Much of their questioning centered on the use of “lockboxes” — devices protesters can use to lock themselves to one another, or to items like fences or equipment — that Greenpeace sent to the protests.
The Morton County sheriff, Kyle Kirchmeier, testified that law enforcement had to scramble to respond to the influx of protesters and the escalation of conflicts. He had to ask for an emergency declaration from the state and to train officers in tactics like disabling lockboxes, he said.
Harmony Lambert, a former Greenpeace employee, said in her deposition that she traveled to Standing Rock in 2016 and also worked with an Indigenous activist group. Emails were shown that she had sent to Greenpeace colleagues at the time detailing her activities, including training people in blockade techniques and donating about 20 lockboxes.
A petition from media organizations, including The New York Times, to stream the proceedings online is pending with the State Supreme Court. Another petition for online access, from a group of left-leaning lawyers who traveled to North Dakota to observe the proceedings, has been denied. That group included the First Amendment lawyer Martin Garbus and Steven Donziger, who spent decades suing oil companies and then served time in prison for contempt of court.
