In 2014, Kaplan concluded in that case that the Ecuadorian judgment against Chevron in Ecuador was obtained fraudulently through a corrupt process, rendering it unenforceable in the United States. In 2011, an Ecuadorian court entered an $18 billion judgment that was later reduced to $9.5 billion against Chevron for contamination resulting from oil production.Ĭhevron then sued Donziger and others in New York, arguing that he and his associates had secured the judgment through fraud by arranging the ghostwriting of a key environmental report and bribing the presiding judge. While not disputing that pollution had occurred, Chevron said the company was released from any liability because it paid $40 million for an environmental clean-up in the 1990s and that Ecuador's state oil company, Petroecuador, was primarily to blame for the pollution. The Harvard Law School graduate had represented villagers in Ecuador's Lago Agrio region who sued Chevron for water and soil contamination caused by Texaco between 19. District Judge Loretta Preska in Manhattan found him guilty of misdemeanor contempt for defying court orders arising from a lawsuit filed by Chevron. Donziger warranted punishment, the prosecution in this case broke a basic constitutional promise essential to our liberty," Gorsuch wrote.ĭonziger on Twitter called the Supreme Court's decision to not hear his case "a huge blow to the rule of law." Steve Vladeck, a University of Texas School of Law professor who represented Donziger, said Gorsuch's dissent "says just about everything I'd say."ĭonziger was sentenced to six months in jail in 2021 after U.S. "However much the district court may have thought Mr. Two members of the Supreme Court's 6-3 conservative majority, Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, dissented from the decision to not hear the appeal, with Gorsuch saying that the Constitution "does not tolerate what happened here." District Judge Lewis Kaplan possessed the authority to appoint the prosecutors, who nonetheless remained subject to supervision by the U.S.
Circuit Court of Appeals last year concluded that U.S. They maintained that the executive branch, not the judiciary, should have pursued any prosecution. Justice Department declined to do so.ĭonziger's lawyers argued that this appointment violated separation-of-powers principles set out in the Constitution delineating the authority of the three branches of the U.S. Constitution because private lawyers appointed by a federal judge handled the case against him after the U.S. The court turned away an appeal by Steven Donziger, who has argued that his prosecution violated his rights under the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear a disbarred environmental lawyer's challenge to his criminal contempt conviction after he earlier won but was unable to collect a $9.5 billion judgment against Chevron Corp (CVX.N) over oil pollution in Ecuadorian rainforests.
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