The Strange Case of Steven Donziger

Excerpts from [1,2]

The story began in 2011 when Donziger brought litigation against Texaco (now Chevron) in Ecuador for the harm it caused the Indigenous people in the Ecuadorian Amazon, where the fossil fuel company decided to deliberately discharge 16 billion gallons of toxic waste from its oil sites into rivers, groundwater, and farmland. A refusal from Chevron to adhere to environmental regulations—which earned the company an extra 5 billion dollas over 20 years—led to more than 30,000 Ecuadorians being directly harmed by the oil giant’s actions, the judges in that case found. The case Donziger led made it all the way to the Ecuador Supreme Court, and successfully secured $9.5 billion in environmental damages for the Amazonian communities in a historic climate justice decision.

Chevron never paid those billions of cleanup dollars to Ecuador, and instead launched a legal attack on Donziger in the Southern District of New York, where Judge Lewis A. Kaplan found Donziger guilty of bribery and fraud in a trial without a jury. Kaplan, a former corporate lawyer, held financial investments in Chevron at the time of the decision. When Kaplan required Donziger to turn in his computer, phone, and other personal devices (including passwords) to the court and thus to Chevron, and Donziger refused citing violations to attorney-client privilege, Kaplan charged him with six counts of criminal contempt under Rule 42. As required by that rule, Kaplan was disqualified from hearing the ensuing contempt case, but not before bypassing local rules and hand-selecting the judge and picking the private prosecutors who would oversee the case. He chose District Judge Loretta Preska, who has served on the advisory board of the Federalist Society, a group to which Chevron has been a substantial donor.

In a letter sent to the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts at the end of last month, Sens. Ed Markey and Sheldon Whitehouse brought into question specifically the use of private prosecutors in the contempt case against Donziger [1].

[As of Oct, 2021 Donziger] has been sentenced to six months in federal prison for “criminal contempt.” On October 1, in a lower Manhattan federal courtroom, Judge Loretta Preska justified imposing the maximum penalty by asserting that Donziger, now 60, had not shown contrition. She said, “It seems that only the proverbial two-by-four between the eyes will instill in him any respect for the law.”...

In May, Preska had found Donziger guilty after a trial without a jury. And now Donziger, along with his family and scores of supporters, had to listen to the federal judge compare him to a mule who needed to be beaten with a piece of wood before complying [2].

References

[1] Slate

[2] The Nation