Chevron Is Trying to Crush a Prominent Climate Lawyer

Chevron Is Trying to Crush a Prominent Climate Lawyer(earther.gizmodo.com)

152 points by qsymmachus 5 years ago | 19 comments

DuPont did something similar in West Virginia with Teflon waste.

Mark Ruffalo made an excellent movie about it.

Dark Waters trailer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvAOuhyunhY

The way public opinion, journalism, and justice work in America, unless Ruffalo makes a great movie about the "Amazon Chernobyl", Steven Donziger is going to spend a lot more time in his apartment, and Ecuadorians are not going to get that $9.5 billion.

darawk 5 years ago |

...except that this guy was convicted of corruption, in US court. And while this article tries to insinuate that judge Kaplan was corrupt...the conviction was upheld on appeal:

> In 2014, after a full trial before Judge Kaplan, Donziger and the other defendants were found guilty of engaging in conspiracy and criminal conduct.

> “Donziger and the Ecuadorian lawyers he led corrupted the Lago Agrio case. They submitted fraudulent evidence. They... falsely presented [a damages assessment] as the work of the court-appointed and supposedly impartial expert, and told half-truths or worse to U.S. courts in attempts to prevent exposure of that and other wrongdoing. [They] wrote the Lago Agrio court’s Judgment themselves and promised $500,000 to the Ecuadorian judge to rule in their favor and sign their judgment,” Judge Kaplan found. “If ever there were a case warranting equitable relief with respect to a judgment procured by fraud, this is it.”

> The ruling was affirmed by a decision issued by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in August 2016, with the appellate court finding “no basis for dismissal or reversal” of the district court’s judgment, noting that “the record in the [case] reveals a parade of corrupt actions… including coercion, fraud and bribery, culminating in the promise to Judge Zambrano of $500,000 from a judgment in favor of the [plaintiffs].”

So...it seems like he probably did engage in corruption to secure the original verdict.

knl 5 years ago | |

The article also states that this Ecuadorian judge later admitted he had lied about the bribe, and has met with Chevron 30+ times before the trial.

darawk 5 years ago | | |

The judge admitted that before the appellate court ruling:

https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160808006005/en/U.S...

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/neye7z/chevrons-star-witn...

The appellate court could have and would have considered this, and decided that it did not reverse the finding of the lower court.

marcus_holmes 5 years ago |

I'm struggling to see why this is a "Prominent Climate Lawyer" - this case is about pollution, not climate.

Not that I'm defending the fossil fuel industry. They've always played dirty with cleaning up their messes (see also the mining industry, who use the same dirty tactics).

I get that there's a connection because Big Oil. And Climate Justice, kinda. But this is a pollution lawsuit.

The danger is that if we only oppose pollution if it's also about climate, then we won't fight when it's "just" pollution. We need to hold their heads to the grinder for polluting the places they operate in, because the money needs to be spent cleaning those places up. Which is also a danger - if any wins from this get diverted into fighting climate change, then who pays to clean up this mess?.

Or maybe it's just a journalist trying to spice up a story. Again.

anm89 5 years ago | |

When you use the word "pollution" what is that is being polluted. It's the climate and one of it's components. So it's totally reasonable to be both.

This is pretty insane mental gymnastics to say that a lawyer working on things related to pollution is not working on things related to the climate.

marcus_holmes 5 years ago | | |

No, the climate is a specific thing. It's not affected by localised pollution. You can pour as much oil as you like into any given lake, river, jungle, desert and you're not going to affect the climate (unless you subsequently burn it, of course).

It is pretty insane mental gymnastics to say that everything related to pollution is also related to climate change. These are two separate Environmental concerns.

youeseh 5 years ago | |

For most people, "climate" lawyer is synonymous with "pollution" lawyer.

hjek 5 years ago |

Donziger was recently interviewed on the Chapo Traphouse podcast[0]. His case sounds utterly bizarre, almost like how Judi Bari was deemed a suspect herself when FBI put a bomb in her car[1].

[0]: https://soundcloud.com/chapo-trap-house/418-the-cool-zone-fe...

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWApxvSjMKY

SpicyLemonZest 5 years ago |

I'm pretty confused by the article's handling of the case against Donzinger. As they note in the middle, there's been a ruling upheld on appeal that he's a fraudster, and that he faked evidence and paid bribes in his earlier case against Chevron. If that ruling is accurate - and the article doesn't really attempt to argue that it isn't - why does the author put any stock in what he has to say?

knl 5 years ago | |

> Through a controversial discovery process, Chevron obtained, among other things, Donziger’s private diary entries. But the company’s central piece of evidence was the testimony of their sole witness: Alberto Guerra, a disgraced Ecuadorian judge who’d been removed from the bench over allegations of corruption and who had accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars and other benefits from the company. After meeting with Chevron’s lawyers 53 times, Guerra testified that Donziger and his team had offered the judge in the original trial a $500,000 bribe and had ghostwritten the 2011 decision against Chevron. In a related case three years later, he admitted he had lied in his testimony.

Maybe because of the above?

aluminum96 5 years ago | | |

Indeed, it seems pretty clear that the position of the article is that Guerra lied in US court in order to bolster Chevron's case.

SpicyLemonZest 5 years ago | | |

Maybe, but again, the article doesn't really explain. Is this the author's research, a statement the author was able to confirm, or just Donziger's unconfirmed characterization of how the case went?