This story was originally published by the Media and Democracy Center and is republished with permission.
In a ruling last week, a Minnesota judge summarily dismissed misdemeanor charges against three Anishinaabe water protectors who had protested at a pipeline construction site in an effort to stop the sands pipeline Enbridge’s line 3 bituminous plants. “Criminalizing their behavior would be the crime,” he concluded.
Judge Leslie Metzen relied on a little-used Minnesota statute that allows a judge to dismiss a case if doing so furthers “justice.” He assessed that, in this case, justice meant dropping the charges against the Anishinaabe who were committed to preserving their treaty lands. “The court finds it within the furtherance of justice to protect defendants who are peacefully protesting to protect land and water,” he wrote.
“I’ve never seen a judge dismiss a case in the name of justice,” said Claire Glenn, an attorney with the Climate Defense Project who was part of the defense team for the water protectors. He said research by the legal team found very few cases where the statute had previously been cited.
The three defendants, Tania Aubid, Dawn Goodwin and Winona LaDuke, were emotional as they processed the sentence during a news conference Monday. Each member of the trio faced a range of charges, including trespassing, harassment, public nuisance and unlawful assembly, for their participation in a protest in January 2021.
“Judge Metzen showed that treaties are the supreme law of the land, and we have every right to protect for future generations,” said Goodwin, who also goes by the name Gaagigeyaashiik and is a member of the Earth Tribe White.
LaDuke, however, argued that the system was not strong enough to keep its people’s land and water safe. Since the pipeline’s completion in 2021, regulators have revealed that Enbridge drilled aquifers at least four times during construction.
“The regulatory system and the legal systems are ill-equipped to deal with the violence of ongoing eco-crimes,” said LaDuke, former director of the nonprofit Honor the Earth. According to her, the water protectors had no choice but to participate in a series of protest actions for months to stop the project.
As the Center for Media and Democracy and Grist exposed in a recent investigation, Enbridge reimbursed sheriffs’ offices, the Minnesota State Patrol, the Department of Natural Resources and even a public relations officer for the work related to quelling the protests, funneling a total of $8.6 million to various agencies through an escrow account set up by the state’s Public Service Commission.
Documents show how a pipeline company paid Minnesotans millions to police protests
According to police reports, a group of 200 protesters blocked traffic on a rural road in Minnesota on January 9, 2021 as they marched to a site where a backhoe was holding a large pipe near a freshly dug hole. Twenty or 30 people entered the pipeline construction site, stopping the work. “A Native American woman I didn’t know, wearing a jingle dress, danced on the edge of the trench and didn’t turn back,” Aitkin County Investigator Steve Cook wrote. Police issued orders to disperse and the protesters left soon after, reports concluded.
An officer on the ground pointed to Aubid and LaDuke as potential leads, and another investigator identified Goodwin after reviewing Facebook videos. But the trio received summonses only weeks later: five misdemeanor charges for Aubid and LaDuke, and three for Goodwin.
It would be months before Enbridge reimbursed law enforcement agencies for the hours they spent monitoring the protest. At least four local law enforcement agencies received more than $17,000 from Enbridge to assign nearly 40 officers to the protest site that day, according to an analysis by the Center for Media and Democracy.
“It was not necessary to have 40 or 50 police officers at any one time,” LaDuke said. “This was excessive force used on all of us — excessive prosecution, and it was incentivized by Enbridge.”
About two weeks after the protest, Enbridge machinery quietly drilled an aquifer at a similar construction site on Line 3. Over the next year, a total of more than 72 million gallons of water went spill out of the earth The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources ordered the company to pay $3.2 million in environmental penalties. However, a misdemeanor was the only criminal charge Enbridge faced, and it came with a deal that said it would be dismissed after a year.
The aquifer violation was key to defense attorneys’ argument to dismiss the charges. At a settlement conference the day before the decision, Joshua Preston, who represented Goodwin, asked the judge to put the case in perspective.
“We have just experienced the hottest summer on record worldwide, a documented fact that led the Secretary-General of the United Nations to issue a statement on September 6 stating that ‘the rupture has begun climate,'” he said. “Why does Enbridge get charged while my customer gets charged?”
“That is the question history will ask if the state is allowed to move forward with its prosecution,” Preston continued.
At the press conference, Frank Bibeau, who is Anishinaabe and a longtime advocate for pipeline opponents, said such arguments are typically ignored when they come from Indigenous people: “These are words we say all the time, but never listen to each other.”
The Line 3 pipeline protests are about much more than climate change
The prosecution filed a total of 967 criminal cases against people attending the Line 3 protests. The vast majority were dismissed, some due to lack of probable cause, others due to negotiated agreements. Not everyone has avoided “guilty” verdicts. In the past three months, two were convicted of crimes for participating in protests. Glenn said those cases involved prosecutorial misconduct that is still being litigated. There are less than 20 open cases left.
In a series of cases, lawyers tried to argue that the involvement of Enbridge’s escrow account means the arrests violated the due process rights of pipeline opponents. However, these arguments did not sway any judges.
Preston’s arguments about the relationship of his clients’ case to the climate crisis, on the other hand, found a receptive audience in the courts. “These cases and these 3 defendants in particular have raised some deep questions for me about what would serve the interests of justice here,” Metzen, the judge, wrote in a memo accompanying the ruling.
“Their meeting may have briefly delayed construction, caused additional expense to law enforcement who came to clean up their meeting (much of which was reimbursed by Aitkin County through Enbridge), but the pipeline has been completed and is operating despite their efforts to stop it. through peaceful protest,” he continued. “In the interests of justice, the charges against these three individuals who were exercising their rights to freedom of speech and to freely express their spiritual beliefs should be dismissed.”
