Six injection well protesters accept plea deal

Six injection well protesters accept plea deal

YOUNGSTOWN

Six environmental protesters who demonstrated at a local injection well entered plea agreements Thursday in Youngstown Municipal Court.

Anne Lukins, 21, of West Virginia; Lindsey Schwartz, 20, of Pennsylvania; Benjamin Shapiro, 26, of Cleveland; Jackson Kusiak, 19, of Massachusetts; Jeremy Bingham, 20, of Massachusetts; and Sean O’Toole, 61, of Warren; were each taken into custody earlier this month and issued a summons for disorderly conduct outside D&L Energy Inc. in the 1000 block of Ohio Works Drive.

A seventh protester, Benjamin Marks, 19, of California, is scheduled for a plea hearing Feb. 2.

The protesters had blocked a water-disposal truck at the Youngstown business, which houses a brine-injection well. The wells are used to dispose of wastewater from fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, a process in which water, chemicals and sand are blasted through pipes into rocks thousands of feet below the ground to unlock natural gas and oil.

The six defendants changed their pleas of not guilty to no contest on amended disorderly conduct charges.

“Each defendant has no criminal record. ...The exercise [was] civil disobedience,” said Atty. Rhys B. Cartwright-Jones, who represented them.

Prosecutors recommended a sentence of six months probation and payment of a $50 fine and court costs.

Cartwright-Jones called the prosecutor’s recommendation a “just and appropriate compromise.”

After Judge Elizabeth A. Kobly imposed the recommended sentence, there was applause in the courtroom, much of it from Occupy Youngstown protestors who were there to express solidarity with the environmental protesters.