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The environmental group, battling a multimillion-dollar lawsuit over protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline, told the court it can’t get a fair trial.
By Karen Zraick
Reporting from the Morton County courthouse in Mandan, N.D.
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.