The protests involved what activists call “direct action,” which involves trespassing on private property, blockading workers, or damaging equipment in an effort to prevent otherwise lawful activity. For example, activists admitted to setting fire to equipment and pipeline valves in an effort to stop construction: https://www.kcci.com/article/2-women-admit-to-causing-damage.... That’s legally straightforward conduct outside 1A protections.

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.

The claims were for defamation and incitement:

> 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.

I'm not a lawyer.

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.

SLAPP as in Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation.

To keep the dissenting voices quiet and to scare other groups from protesting.

Modus operandi for many industries.

> Greenpeace USA, not Greenpeace Fund or Greenpeace International

Why is something like this allowed to exist... Stacking entities and funneling wealth around in the guise of a noble cause.

Or maybe, just maybe, they actually did unreasonably damage the pipeline company's reputation, in a way that is outside the legally-recognized bounds of free speech. Maybe justice actually was done.

(Note well: I haven't been following this case closely enough to say. But you should at least consider that as a possibility.)

North Dakota jury breaking things to please Daddy T. On a larger scale, jury trials for defamation are a ticking time bomb catastrophe, long term incompatible with free speech. Source: was on a defamation jury and it was an utter clown fiesta and pretty close to ended my remaining faith in the US legal system and the population as a whole.

They specifically weren't found liable for on the ground activity, so the fact that only six employees were on the ground seems like a bit of a red herring.

> 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.

No, their lawyers did a fairly decent job of demonstrating that Greenpeace wasn't coordinating the radical protestors that were showing up to the protests, anymore than MAGA was coordinating all of the violent shootings by right-wingers last year.

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.

Some of the jurors had financial ties Energy Transfer, the district is heavily conservative and economically dependent on the oil industry. The deck was massively stacked against Greenpeace at trial.

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.