Being Numerous by Natasha Lennard

Author:Natasha Lennard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

In April 2018, WPLC published a tally of case statistics. Of the 831 arrests, 578 cases had concluded, with 337 won through dismissal or acquittal at trial; 226 water protectors have accepted some sort of pretrial agreement, but none that requires cooperation with the government in other defendants’ prosecutions. Over half of these agreements were “pretrial diversions”—delayed dismissals that do not entail an admission of guilt. One hundred and forty-four trials were still to begin.

Accounting for every arrestee and finding each defendant appropriate representation constituted a mammoth task in and of itself. In the meantime, Freshet and WPLC worked with the local lawyers to build collective defense strategies around major days of mass arrests—like October 27—from which scores of protesters faced similar charges, and for which allegations of infirm arrest and police brutality were numerous.

And for the prosecutors, mass arrest days, which involved law enforcement officers from around the country and state, have proven a challenge. “The prosecution is realizing that they can’t make out the elements of the charged offenses,” said Moira Meltzer-Cohen, a New York–based attorney who has traveled back and forth to North Dakota to represent nine defendants with cases in state court in Mandan. “Some of their cases have been dismissed by judges, and also because, having brought in law enforcement from all over the country, those extra-jurisdictional cops made arrests, failed to complete any meaningful paperwork, went home, and are not keen to return to testify about something that happened in a chaotic environment months ago,” she said, noting that without evidence showing individualized probable cause and without witnesses, the prosecution has dismissed some charges, which should never have been brought. Meltzer-Cohen, whom I’ve known for many years through her work on activist cases in New York, called the legal situation “a mess.”

Local paper, the Bismarck Tribune, which skewed dramatically against protesters and in favor of law enforcement in its editorial pages, took acquittals at trial as an occasion to opine that “the system works for everyone.” Meltzer-Cohen scoffed at the editorial. “They had to acquit,” she said. “There was absolutely no basis for the charges.”

The lawyer did not see the wave of dismissals as an outright victory, but evidence of vast police misconduct and original prosecutorial overreach. “The way the cops use arrest as a form of crowd control dovetails so neatly with the way prosecutors drain us, even without getting any results. It’s such a stupid war of attrition, with such Pyrrhic victories on both ends,” she said.

During the camp protests, the pipeline was dubbed “the black snake.” But for the Lakota, the black snake is not just one pipeline. It harkens back to a prophecy in which a great black snake would come to the Lakota lands and devastate the earth. According to the prophecy, it would be the youth who would rise up to slay the black snake—a detail not lost on the Standing Rock Sioux youth who were the first to set up camp against the pipeline in April 2016.

“The

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