State v. Foster

A jury in North Dakota state court found a defendant who participated in a protest by turning a valve on the Keystone Pipeline guilty of conspiracy to commit criminal mischief, criminal mischief, and criminal trespass, but not guilty of reckless endangerment. A second defendant was found guilty of trespass. A week earlier the court denied the defendants’ request to present a necessity defense. The North Dakota court found that the defendants’ offered proof would not allow a reasonable person to conclude that they had no reasonable legal alternative and that a reasonable person could not conclude based on the defendants’ proof that the harms of climate change, “however serious they might be, were imminent and certain to occur absent defendants’ acts.” The court also found that expert testimony both as to the efficacy of nonviolent civil disobedience as a means to political change and as to the defendants’ belief that their actions would reduce the amount of tar sands transported through the pipeline did not reach the level of proof necessary to show a direct, causal relationship between the defendants’ acts and the avoidance of harm.