The three prosecutors that Kaplan appointed, Brian Maloney, Sareen Armani, and Rita Glavin (who is also Andrew Cuomo’s personal lawyer), were all at the time with the law firm Seward & Kissel. Courts at the end of last month, Senators Ed Markey and Sheldon Whitehouse brought into question specifically the use of private prosecutors in the contempt case against Donziger. In a letter sent to the Administrative Office of the U.S. 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. 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. 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. Kaplan, a former corporate lawyer, held financial investments in Chevron at the time of the decision. Kaplan found Donziger guilty of bribery and fraud in a trial without a jury. 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.Ĭhevron 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. A refusal from Chevron to adhere to environmental regulations - which earned the company an extra $5 billion 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 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. ![]() ![]() In Steven Donziger’s conviction, the initial judge who referred him to trial, the second judge who was asked to lead the trial, and the private prosecutors who tried him all had deep ties to Chevron, the company Donziger had won a landmark multibillion-dollar ruling against. This story was originally published by Slate and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.Īfter spending more than 700 days under house arrest, a human rights and environmental lawyer was found guilty last month of criminal contempt in a legal saga that has demonstrated the deep-rooted conflicts of interest layered throughout the judicial system when it comes to climate justice.
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