Lawyer Who Won $9.5 Billion Settlement Against Chevron Reports to Prison

“We will get through this,” he added.

Representatives for Chevron did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

On July 31, 2019, Judge Lewis A. Kaplan of the U.S. District Court in Manhattan, a former corporate lawyer, tried to charge Mr. Donziger with contempt of court based on his refusals in 2014 to give the court access to decades of client communications on devices like his phone and his computer. That year, Judge Kaplan supported Chevron’s complaint in a 500-page ruling finding that Mr. Donziger and his associates had engaged in a conspiracy and criminal conduct by ghostwriting an environmental report used as a crucial piece of evidence and bribing a judge in Ecuador.

After the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York declined to prosecute the case, Judge Kaplan took the rare step of appointing a private law firm, Seward Kissel, to prosecute Mr. Donziger in the name of the U.S. government, Mr. Kuby said.

Seward Kissel has represented many oil and gas companies throughout the years, including Chevron in 2018.

Misdemeanor criminal contempt carries a maximum sentence of one year. If the penalty is more than six months for this type of charge, Mr. Kuby said, a defendant would get a trial by jury. Even after multiple objections by Mr. Donziger, Judge Loretta A. Preska lowered the sentencing to six months — it had previously been set to a year — and denied Mr. Donziger’s request for a jury trial.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/27/business/energy-environment/steven-donziger-chevron.html