In new report, Energy Transfer v. Greenpeace Trial Monitors Identify Staggering Violations of Due Process That Prevented Greenpeace From a Fair Trial

New York, NY – Today, the independent committee of lawyers and legal scholars closely monitoring the proceedings in Energy Transfer v. Greenpeace released its official findings in a landmark post-trial report.

The analysis, sourced from both in-person and remote trial observation, document review, and examination of publicly available information to ensure a comprehensive and accurate account of the proceedings, finds that the $669 million jury verdict against Greenpeace International, Greenpeace USA, and Greenpeace Fund was the result of a fundamentally flawed trial that prevented Greenpeace the opportunity to present a proper defense in court. The report identifies numerous violations of due process throughout the trial, and finds the resulting verdict sets a dangerous legal precedent that poses grave threats to free speech, the rule of law, judicial fairness, and Indigenous rights.

"We have documented pervasive bias in the jury pool in favor of Energy Transfer", said trial monitor Jeanne Mirer, president of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers and co-chair of the National Lawyer’s Guild International Committee. "Juror after juror conceded they had ties to the very oil and gas industry prosecuting the case -- even so, the court would not excuse them for cause. Not a single Native American or person of color was seated on the jury, and multiple efforts to change the venue to a county other than the protest site, an absolute necessity to ensure a fair trial, were rejected by the court. The bottom line is that Greenpeace did not get a fair trial."

"The findings underscored in this report reflect how deeply imbalanced this trial was from the very start. Our work exposing how rigged this trial was from the very beginning is causing Energy Transfer (ET) and their lawyers to panic", said trial monitor Steven Donziger, a human rights advocate and attorney who won the largest environmental damages lawsuit in history on behalf of Amazon communities. "ET's lead lawyer in the case, Trey Cox of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, sent a letter threatening to sue me for calling this trial rigged. But that is exactly what happened, and the evidence we documented in our investigation is irrefutable. Greenpeace has enormously favorable grounds on appeal."

"I have documented human rights abuses and sham trials across the globe under some of the world's most repressive regimes, but the myriad violations of fair trial rights I witnessed in that North Dakota courtroom has shocked me to the core", said Wade McMullen, Esq., Distinguished Fellow of the Human Rights Institute at the Georgetown University Law Center. "As a result, the judiciary is paving the way for private corporations to pile on to the alarming authoritarian efforts underway to extinguish free speech in this country and obliterate our fundamental right to advocate for the protection of human rights."

“I recognize this playbook from Chevron’s attacks on the Indigenous peoples of the Ecuadorian Amazon and their allies: a fossil fuel corporation fabricates a narrative of wrongdoing to evade accountability, undermine Indigenous rights, and punish those who stand in solidarity", said Paul Paz y Miño, Deputy Director of Amazon Watch. "It is no surprise that Gibson Dunn—the same law firm that weaponized the U.S. legal system against the people of Ecuador and their advocates—is once again at the center of this assault. I witnessed the same tactics in both cases."

The committee's report identifies 8 principal findings:

• Finding 1: Limited Public Access Undermined Greenpeace’s Right to a Fair Trial and Shielded Energy Transfer from Accountability.

  • At the urging of ET, the court continually denied motions from Greenpeace and requests from independent media outlets to allow the trial to be viewed remotely online, despite court facilities making this possible. This is unusual — remote access is often permitted in North Dakota, and one recent trial was televised live. This unusual lack of transparency helped to shield both ET and the court from public scrutiny.

• Finding 2: The Court’s Refusal to Change the Venue Resulted in a Tainted Jury.

  • There are multiple reasons why Morton County was unable to provide a fair trial to Greenpeace. With a small population of roughly 33,000 people, the county maintains a strong economic dependence on the fossil fuel industry and is home to the largest oil refinery in North Dakota. These structural problems were exacerbated by steps ET took to tilt the jury pool in its favor, including donating $1.5 million to the tiny Mandan Public Library shortly before the jury selection was to begin. In the same period, a paid advertising campaign was launched throughout the county, casting ET in a positive light while disparaging the protestors as disruptive. Believing the campaign to have been financed or orchestrated by ET, Greenpeace sought discovery on its origins, but the motion was denied by the court. The subsequent jury selection process raised serious questions about the impartiality of the empaneled jurors, some of whom had direct ties to the law enforcement agencies that policed the protests. Other jurors had ties to the oil and gas industry, with one even working for an ET subsidiary.

• Finding 3: Judicial Incompetence and Bias Hindered a Fair Trial.

  • The presiding judge, James Gion, frequently admitted in open court that he had little or no experience with civil jury trials of this type or scale. He frequently displayed confusion about the appropriate legal standard to apply to a particular question and generally appeared to lack knowledge about important procedural and evidentiary concepts. In particular, Judge Gion openly acknowledged his lack of expertise in the multifaceted First Amendment issues central to Greenpeace’s legal defense. His general incompetence was coupled with what this Committee believes to have been a troubling degree of bias towards Greenpeace. He exhibited a consistent pattern in overruling seemingly valid objections and denying seemingly reasonable motions by Greenpeace, while simultaneously permitting ET to introduce highly prejudicial evidence.

• Finding 4: Inequality of Arms Allowed ET to Abuse the Legal Process.

  • Given ET’s willingness to regularly deploy its vast resources to gain a structural advantage, its lawsuit against Greenpeace violates the international legal principle of “equality of arms.” While this principle does not guarantee both parties in a civil litigation access to the same level of resources, it does prohibit massive resource imbalances like the one present in the trial at hand. Such an imbalance allowed ET to use abusive legal tactics, including seeking excessive damages, engaging in forum shopping, and drawing out the litigation against Greenpeace over the course of nearly a decade.

• Finding 5: Misleading Jury Instructions and a Flawed Verdict Form Led to Wildly Excessive Damages.

  • Improper jury instructions resulted in the jury’s massively excessive $667 million damages award. For example, the Court erroneously allowed verdicts for both Defamation and Defamation Per Se on behalf of each of the two Plaintiffs, Energy Transfer LP and Dakota Access LLC, rather than requiring the jury to choose between the two, amounting to double damages for a single cause of action. This kind of mistake, which was repeated elsewhere in the proceedings, increased the verdict by $124,958,550.

• Finding 6: Energy Transfer’s Lawsuit Constitutes a SLAPP.

  • Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPPs) are “lawsuits or threats of legal action which use abusive litigation tactics with the aim or effect of suppressing public participation and critical reporting on public interest matters.” These actions violate the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and are outlawed in the majority of states. Based on evidence detailed in this report, the Committee finds that ET’s case against Greenpeace meets international standards of a SLAPP.

• Finding 7: Energy Transfer’s Lawsuit Violates Greenpeace’s Rights Under the First Amendment and Imposes a Broader Chilling Effect on Civil Society.

  • ET’s SLAPP attempts to characterize Greenpeace’s legitimate human rights advocacy as unlawful. Specifically, the lawsuit seeks to punish Greenpeace for the exercise of the fundamental rights to freedom of expression, assembly, and association in support of the Indigenous-led opposition to DAPL. By forcing Greenpeace to incur significant legal fees and endure time-consuming litigation, ET’s lawsuit has severely curtailed Greenpeace’s capacity to carry out its human rights advocacy. ET’s lawsuit also causes a broader chilling effect on civil society, both by deterring its critics from public participation and by likely opening the floodgates to even more pervasive bad-faith litigation by corporations against human rights and environmental advocates.

• Finding 8: Energy Transfer’s Lawsuit Violates the Sovereignty and Rights of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and Indigenous Peoples.

  • We believe that ET’s case against Greenpeace is, at its core, an attack on Indigenous Peoples. In a previous case, ET attempted to suppress opposition to DAPL by targeting the Standing Rock Sioux Tribal leadership. When that case was dismissed, ET pivoted and attempted to hold a non-Indigenous organization responsible for what was an Indigenous-led movement.

In light of these findings, the committee recommends the following actions:

1. The North Dakota judiciary should vacate the judgment against Greenpeace. Post-trial motions by Greenpeace and a pending appeal to the North Dakota Supreme Court provide ample opportunity for the state’s judiciary to correct the many violations of due process that occurred during the trial.

2. Greenpeace should be reimbursed for all reasonable legal fees that it incurred to defend against the SLAPP. The judiciary should consider imposing a fine on ET and its law firm sufficient to discourage future SLAPPs.

3. North Dakota and the United States should enact robust anti-SLAPP statutes, following the 39 other U.S. states that have already done so. Additionally, North Dakota should revise its laws and regulations to create the presumption of open court access for the public, media, and trial monitors, including remote viewing.

4. The North Dakota and relevant state bar associations should investigate and hold Gibson Dunn attorneys accountable for ethics violations arising from the SLAPP lawsuit against Greenpeace.

5. The United States must respect, protect, and fulfill the rights of Indigenous Peoples and, in particular, uphold the rights guaranteed under the Fort Laramie Treaties of 1851 and 1868. For example, the North Dakota and United States governments should implement judicial training on Native American treaty rights and Tribal law.

6. The North Dakota judiciary should prepare and release a full transcript of the trial proceedings to the public.

Post-verdict developments
In October 2025, the $669 million verdict was reduced by nearly half to $340 million by Judge Gion, who subsequently issued a final judgment in February 2026 that ordered Greenpeace to pay an additional 11% interest on this sum, starting from March 19th, 2025 until the full amount is paid.

The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe have denounced the verdict on multiple grounds, and Greenpeace is actively appealing it before the North Dakota Supreme Court. At the same time, Greenpeace International has filed a landmark anti-SLAPP lawsuit against Energy Transfer in the Netherlands. That lawsuit is currently proceeding.

About the Trial Monitoring Committee

The Energy Transfer v. Greenpeace trial monitoring committee includes veteran civil rights attorney Marty Garbus; Jeanne Mirer, President of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers; Wade McMullen, Distinguished Fellow at the Georgetown Law Human Rights Institute; Jackie Dugard, Senior Lecturer at the Institute for the Study of Human Rights at Columbia University; Terry Collingsworth, Founder and Executive Director of IRAdvocates; Nadia Ahmad, Associate Professor at the Barry University School of Law; Paul Paz y Miño, Deputy Director of Amazon Watch; Simon Taylor, Co-Founder of Global Witness; Kip Hale, Chief of Staff to the Atrocity Crimes Advisory Group for Ukraine and for Georgetown University's International Criminal Justice Initiative; Jacqueline C.A. Dugard, Senior Lecturer at Columbia University; Ayisha Saddiqa, Climate Advisor to the United Nations General Secretary and Youth Envoy; and Steven Donziger, the human rights advocate and attorney targeted by Chevron after helping Amazonian communities in Ecuador win a landmark pollution case. The group also includes law students from Georgetown University and Columbia University in support roles.

To learn more about the committee, please visit trialmonitors.org.

###