A North Dakota state prosecutor has sought to charge Amy Goodman with participating in a "riot" for filming an attack on Native American-led anti-pipeline protesters. The new charge comes after the prosecutor dropped criminal trespassing charges.
State’s Attorney Ladd R Erickson filed the new charges on Friday before District Judge John Grinsteiner who will decide on Monday (October 17) whether probable cause exists for the riot charge.
Goodman has travelled to North Dakota to face the charges and will appear at Morton County court on Monday at 1:30 pm local time (CDT) if the charges are approved.
“I came back to North Dakota to fight a trespass charge. They saw that they could never make that charge stick, so now they want to charge me with rioting, " said Goodman. "I wasn’t trespassing, I wasn’t engaging in a riot, I was doing my job as a journalist by covering a violent attack on Native American protesters."
In an e-mail to Goodman’s attorney Tom Dickson on October 12, State’s Attorney Erickson admitted that there were "legal issues with proving the notice of trespassing requirements in the statute." In an earlier email on October 12, Erickson wrote that Goodman "was not acting as a journalist," despite that fact that the state’s criminal complaint recognized that, "Amy Goodman can be seen on the video …interviewing protesters."
In that email Erikson justified his quote in the
Bismarck Tribune in which he had said that "She’s [Amy Goodman] a protester, basically. Everything she reported on was from the position of justifying the protest actions." The First Amendment, of course, applies irrespective of the content of a reporter’s story.
Breaking: ND Prosecutor Seeks "Riot" Charges Against Amy Goodman For Reporting On Pipeline Protest | Democracy Now!
In an ominous sign for press freedom, documentary filmmaker and journalist Deia Schlosberg was arrested and charged with felonies carrying a whopping maximum sentence of up to 45 years in prison—simply for reporting on the ongoing Indigenous protests against fossil fuel infrastructure.
Schlosberg was arrested in Walhalla, North Dakota on Tuesday for filming activists shutting down a tar sands pipeline, part of
a nationwide solidarity action organized on behalf of those battling the
Dakota Access Pipeline.
The filmmaker was held without access to a lawyer for 48 hours, her colleague Josh Fox
wrote in the
Nation, and her footage was confiscated by the police.
Schlosberg was then charged Friday with three felonies, the
Huffington Post reported: "conspiracy to theft of property, conspiracy to theft of services and conspiracy to tampering with or damaging a public service. Together, the charges carry 45 years in maximum prison sentences."
"They have in my view violated the First Amendment," Fox
told the
Huffington Post, referring to the state's Pembina County Sheriff's Department. “It’s ****ing scary, it knocks the wind of your sails, it throws you for a loop. They threw the book at Deia for being a journalist."
NSA whistleblower
Edward Snowden observed that Schlosberg faces more years in prison than he does for leaking secret documents about the NSA's mass surveillance program in 2013:
Filmmaker Faces 45 Years in Prison for Reporting on Dakota Access Protests | Common Dreams | Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community
