{"id":18151,"date":"2021-03-29T12:07:47","date_gmt":"2021-03-29T19:07:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/?p=18151"},"modified":"2021-03-29T12:07:49","modified_gmt":"2021-03-29T19:07:49","slug":"the-lawyer-who-took-on-chevron-and-now-marks-his-600th-day-under-house-arrest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/2021\/03\/29\/the-lawyer-who-took-on-chevron-and-now-marks-his-600th-day-under-house-arrest\/","title":{"rendered":"The lawyer who took on Chevron \u2013 and now marks his 600th day under house arrest"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"Steven
Steven Donziger, who on march 28th will have been under house arrest for 600 days. Photograph: Laylah Amatullah Barrayn\/The Guardian<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Steven Donziger has been detained at home since August 2019, the result of a Kafkaesque legal battle stemming from his crusade on behalf of Indigenous Amazonians<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Oliver<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Oliver Milman<\/a>@olliemilman<\/a> Sun 28 March 2021 (TheGuardian.com)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

M<\/strong>any of us will have felt the grip of claustrophobic isolation over the past year, but the lawyer Steven Donziger has experienced an extreme, very personal confinement as a pandemic arrived and then raged around him in New York City.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On Sunday, Donziger reached his 600th day of an unprecedented house arrest that has resulted from a sprawling, Kafkaesque legal battle with the oil giant Chevron. Donziger spearheaded a lengthy crusade against the company on behalf of tens of thousands of Indigenous people in the Amazon rainforest<\/a> whose homes and health were devastated by oil pollution, only to himself become, as he describes it, the victim of a \u201cplanned targeting by a corporation to destroy my life\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since August 2019, Donziger has been restricted to his elegant Manhattan apartment, a clunky court-mandated monitoring bracelet he calls \u201cthe black claw\u201d continuously strapped to his left ankle. He cannot even venture into the hallway, or to pick up his mail. Exempted excursions for medical appointments or major school events for his 14-year-old son require permission days in advance. An indoor bike sits by the front door in lieu of alternative exercise options<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Steven
Steven Donziger\u2019s monitoring bracelet, placed on his ankle. Photograph: Laylah Amatullah Barrayn<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThere\u2019s no comparison to quarantine because I can\u2019t even go outside for a walk. If my kid is sick I can\u2019t go to the drug store to get a prescription,\u201d Donziger said. \u201cI never truly understood freedom until I was put in this situation.\u201dAdvertisement<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The nights are hardest for Donziger, when he has to struggle to get his jeans off over the boxy tag and lie in bed next to his wife \u201cwith the government still there on my ankle\u201d. Each morning he wakes up in angst. A flag reading \u201cSOS Free Steven\u201d sometimes flutters defiantly from the window, but efforts to end the unusually long detention have yet to be granted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt\u2019s been brutally difficult for him,\u201d said Paul Paz y Mi\u00f1o, associate director of Amazon Watch, a conservation group allied to Donziger. \u201cIt\u2019s taken a huge toll on him and his family. Chevron<\/a> wants the narrative to be that he\u2019s a criminal. The implications of that for the entire environmental movement against oil companies is terrifying.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are moments of relief, such as sticking his head outside to taste a sunny day or talking to his growing legion of outraged supporters, which now spans Alec Baldwin<\/a>, Pink Floyd singer Roger Waters<\/a> and dozens of Nobel laureates<\/a>. \u201cThere\u2019s never a day off, I can never properly relax,\u201d Donziger said. \u201cBut you either grow or die in a situation like this. And I\u2019ve been growing.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"A
A well in Amazonian Peru. Donziger was first touched by his case with Chevron in 1993. Photograph: Rodrigo Buend\u00eda\/AFP\/Getty Images<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The dispute with Chevron centres upon a landmark 2011 decision by the Ecuador courts<\/a> to order the company pay $9.5bn in damages to people blighted by decades of polluted air and water. Chevron has never paid up, claiming \u201cshocking levels of misconduct\u201d and fraud by Donziger and the Ecuadorian judiciary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But the subsequent web of events that has led to Donziger being detained and stripped of his law license is befuddling even to legal scholars. \u201cFrankly, I scratch my head when I look at this case,\u201d said Larry Cat\u00e1 Backer, a professor of international law at Penn State University. \u201cIt is this strange multi-front battle with one extraordinary explosive development after another. It has had this magical quality to enrage everyone involved in it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Donziger was first touched by the case that would consume his life as a young lawyer acting as a public defender in Washington. In 1993, he joined a legal team investigating reports of pollution in the Lago Agrio region of northern Ecuador<\/a>, nestled next to the country\u2019s border with Colombia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The oil company Texaco had carved out drilling outposts in this tract of the Amazon since the 1960s, leaving what Donziger calls \u201cgrotesque\u201d Olympic swimming pool-sized waste pits of oil. Pollution flowed freely into rivers and streams used by the Indigenous population for drinking water. Cancers of the stomach, liver and throat reportedly became more common<\/a> in the region, as did childhood leukemia. \u201cPeople there are living in a humanitarian crisis of epic proportions,\u201d Donziger said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A Spanish speaker, Donziger became ever more enmeshed in the case, traveling to Ecuador hundreds of times to assemble a case in behalf of local people. Despite lengthy attempts by Chevron, which bought Texaco, to block the case, the action ultimately went to trial and resulted in a historic judgement against the oil company.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Donziger\u2019s elation was short-lived, however, with Chevron claiming that his team ghostwrote what should have been an independent assessment and offered a $500,000 bribe to sway the judgment. Donziger denied any wrongdoing and the Ecuador supreme court later affirmed the original ruling, but Chevron has refused to pay the $9.5bn in damages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A US federal judge then concurred with the fraud allegations, negating the possibility of wrenching the money from Chevron in its home country, finding<\/a> that Donziger conducted a \u201cpattern of racketeering activity\u201d under statutes more commonly used to target mob bosses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Steven
Steven Donziger: \u2018I never truly understood freedom until I was put in this situation.\u2019 Photograph: Laylah Amatullah Barrayn<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Donziger was made liable for millions of dollars in Chevron\u2019s legal costs and the company was granted seizure of his laptop and cellphone. When he appealed this, claiming the devices contained sensitive client information, the judge, Lewis Kaplan, hit him with criminal contempt charges,\u00a0upheld<\/a>\u00a0on appeal, that led to his house arrest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In one of the stranger episodes in this saga, Chevron relocated Alberto Guerra, an Ecuadorian judge, and his family to the US, paid for his health insurance and a car while meeting with him more than 50 times before he provided testimony that Donziger discussed the bribe with him at a Quito restaurant. Guerra has since admitted<\/a> that his testimony was exaggerated in parts, untrue in others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This deception, the unprecedented length of detention for a misdemeanor charge, legal disbarment and personal financial wipeout has fueled a sense of persecution in Donziger. Kaplan\u2019s conduct, Donziger said, has been an \u201cabomination, unethical and abusive. I never thought this could happen in the US.\u201d Other lawyers have voiced more measured concerns<\/a> over Kaplan. Chevron has \u201ccaptured\u201d the judge, Donziger said, and now the oil company seems omnipresent in his fate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His contempt charge will be heard by Judge Loretta Preska, who was on the advisory board of the New York chapter of the Federalist Society<\/a>, who took the unusual step of appointing a law firm that has previously done work for Chevron, Seward & Kissel, to prosecute Donziger after the department of justice declined to take the case. \u201cWhy am I being tried by a Chevron-connected judge and prosecuted by a Chevron-connected lawyer? It\u2019s just wrong,\u201d Donziger said. \u201cThis is all part of a plan concocted by Chevron to dismantle my life. They want to do this to avoid paying up and to turn me into a weapon of intimidation against the whole legal profession.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Christiana Ochoa, an expert in environmental law at Indiana University, said Kaplan and Preska\u2019s connections<\/a> do not themselves prove any sort of bias, and that Kaplan\u2019s strongly worded judgment suggests \u201cnot great behavior\u201d by Donziger. But she added that the severity of Donziger\u2019s treatment is \u201codd\u201d and that questions remain over the conflict of interest in his prosecution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cCertainly it\u2019s very important to corporations like Chevron to protect themselves from liability from ecological harms,\u201d she said. \u201cThey\u2019ve refused to apologize to the victims. They don\u2019t want to show any vulnerability.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Steven
Steven Donziger supporters show their support outside the federal courthouse in New York. Photograph: Justin Lane\/EPA<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

A Chevron spokesman said an international tribunal has confirmed<\/a> the Ecuadorian decision was \u201cfraudulent\u201d and he denied the company has persecuted its longtime adversary. \u201cDonziger has no one to blame but himself for his problems,\u201d the spokesman said. \u201cThe court initiated the pending criminal case against him. Chevron is not involved in that case.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Donziger\u2019s eyes, the only real corruption has occurred in the US system, not Ecuador\u2019s, a symptom of what he views as a \u201ccolonial\u201d mindset that has airily dismissed judgements made outside the US and obscured the ultimate protagonists of this saga, the people of Lago Agrio. Shortly before his house arrest, in the summer of 2019, Donziger toured some villages in Ecuador, discovering some people he\u2019d previously met had died of cancer. The toxic pits remain, despite a piecemeal attempt<\/a> by the government at a cleanup.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe human suffering is immense,\u201d he said. \u201cIt was hard to see. Ultimately, all this isn\u2019t about me. It\u2019s about what has happened to these people.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Steven Donziger has been detained at home since August 2019, the result of a Kafkaesque legal battle stemming from his crusade on behalf of Indigenous Amazonians Oliver Milman@olliemilman Sun 28 March 2021 (TheGuardian.com) Many of us will have felt the grip of claustrophobic isolation over the past year, but the… Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18151"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18151"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18151\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18152,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18151\/revisions\/18152"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18151"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18151"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18151"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}