Steven Donziger is free after almost a millennium. On Monday, the lawyer, who has been targeted by Chevron for years in a court battle, finished a six-month sentence, which came on the heels of more than two years under house arrest in his Manhattan apartment. Donziger has mixed emotions about the ending of the saga.
Maybe the world is trying to crush a prominent climate lawyer.
He told me by phone on Monday that he was excited to be able to make normal choices in a free society.
In 1993 Donziger began representing a group of 30,000 Indigenous people and farmers in a lawsuit against Texaco. The oil giant spilled 16 million gallons of crude and deposited billions of gallons of toxic waste in unlined pits over the course of two decades after setting up shop in the region in the 1970s. In 1992 locals decided to file a lawsuit after Texaco left the region.
The case dragged on for 18 years, through the 2000 purchase of Texaco by Chevron, which was later ordered to pay $18 billion in compensation by an Ecuadorian court. Chevron immediately began fighting the ruling and still hasn't paid a cent of the fine. In 2009, internal emails from Chevron were sent to demonize Donziger. Donziger and two other people were sued by Chevron.
The abuses of power in this case are so implausible that they are almost unbelievable. Donziger and the other defendants were deprived of the right to a jury trial after Chevron dropped any monetary claims. The judge banned Donziger and the other defendants from bringing up the company, which is important to the economy. The testimony of a disgraced judge, who had accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars from Chevron, was the main evidence used by the oil giant. He later admitted to lying in his testimony. Donziger and other defendants were found guilty by Kaplan.
“What happened to me goes way beyond just me. It was part of a design by the fossil fuel industry...to create a playbook to silence those who advocate effectively and successfully against major polluters who are destroying the planet.”The saga continued and got even more twisted. Kaplan asked federal prosecutors to bring contempt of court charges against Donziger because he refused to hand over his electronic devices during the trial. Donziger said giving his electronics to the court would betray his private client information. Kaplan pulled the unprecedented move of assigning a team of private prosecutors to prosecute Donziger after public prosecutors declined to press charges. Kaplan was led by an attorney who worked for a law firm with a history of representing Chevron. Kaplan picked a judge who has a history of positive rulings in favor of energy companies and is an advisor to the Federalist Society, a pro-business group that has benefited from donations from Chevron. Donziger was put under house arrest by Preska because they claimed he was a flight risk.
The case is certainly a wild example of justice run amok, but it has chilling implications for what could be possible for a private company to use the courts to silence critics.
Donziger was found guilty of criminal contempt. The UN High Commissioner on Human Rights ruled that Donziger's house arrest was illegal and called on the US to release him. The six international jurists that made up the UN body said in a brief that they were appalled by the allegations against Donziger. Donziger was returned to house arrest in December of 2021.
Donziger sees a victory against Chevron in the new attention to his case and the pollution in the Amazon. They thought they could crush me, but they created a situation where I have a platform and a voice. I think they have a real problem.
Now that his sentence is over, the struggle isn't over. Donzinger and his supporters are trying to get a pardon for Donziger from the president. He explained that a pardon wouldn't set a legal precedent to prevent a case like his from happening again, but it could discourage other judges from trying out the same tactics on the next person who dares to stand up to Big Oil.
He said that the industry wants to make this a new normal.
EartherEnvironmental Justice
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