A Native American man leads a protest march with veterans and activists outside the Oceti Sakowin camp where "water protectors" continue to demonstrate against plans to pass the Dakota Access pipeline adjacent to the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, near Cannon Ball, North Dakota, U.S., December 5, 2016.
A Native American man leads a protest march with veterans and activists outside the Oceti Sakowin camp where "water protectors" continue to demonstrate against plans to pass the Dakota Access pipeline adjacent to the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, near Cannon Ball, North Dakota, U.S., December 5, 2016.
A North Dakota jury on Wednesday awarded damages totalling more than $660 million to the Texas-based pipeline company Energy Transfer, which had sued Greenpeace over its role in protests nearly a decade ago against the Dakota Access Pipeline.
The verdict was a major blow to the environmental organisation. Greenpeace had said that Energy Transfer’s claimed damages, in the range of $300 million, would be enough to put the group out of business in the US. The jury on Wednesday awarded far more than that.
Greenpeace said it would appeal. The group has maintained that it played only a minor part in demonstrations led by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe.
The nine-person jury in the Morton County courthouse in Mandan, North Dakota, about 45 minutes north of where the protests took place, returned the verdict after roughly two days of deliberations.
It took about a half-hour simply to read out the long list of questions posed to the jurors, such as whether they found that Greenpeace had committed trespass, defamation and conspiracy, among other violations, and how much money they would award for each offence. Afterwards, outside the courthouse in Mandan, both sides invoked the right to free speech.
“We should all be concerned about the attacks on our First Amendment, and lawsuits like this that really threaten our rights to peaceful protest and free speech,” said Deepa Padmanabha, a senior legal adviser for Greenpeace USA.
New York Times News Service