Steven Donziger[Salad Bowl strike|] is an American attorney known for his legal battles with Chevron, particularly the Lago Agrio oil field case which led the company to withdraw its operations from Ecuador. Donziger is currently under house arrest awaiting trial on charges of contempt of court in relation to the case, a move condemned by twenty-nine Nobel laureates as "judicial harassment" by Chevron.
Early life and education
Donziger's mother raised him in Jacksonville, Florida, where she took him to picket in support of Cesar Chavez's lettuce boycott. While Donziger was a child, his grandfather was a Brooklyn district attorney and judge. Donziger attended Harvard Law School, where he played basketball with Barack Obama. He visited Ecuador in 1993, two years after completing law school, where he says he saw "what honestly looked like an apocalyptic disaster," including children walking barefoot down oil-covered roads and jungle lakes filled with oil.
Legal and environmental work
After his visit to Ecuador, Donziger began working with inhabitants of the Amazonian village Lago Agrio on a class-action lawsuit. In 2009, Donziger became lead organizer of 30,000 indigenous peoples in Ecuador in a class action lawsuit against Chevron over the company's activities in the Lago Agrio oil field. During the trial, Chevron General Counsel Hew Pate authorized payments of USD$2 million to Alberto Guerra, a witness who was paid to falsely testify that Donziger had approved a bribe in Ecuador. Chevron was ordered to pay $18 billion in 2011 as a result of the contamination of indigenous land for oil extraction activities. Following the conclusion of the case, Chevron appealed the ruling, leading to a reduction in the fine to $9.5 billion; no money has been awarded, pending further appeals.
Kaplan's 2014 ruling on the Chevron case
Chevron filed a Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations suit against Donziger. U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan provided his ruling on the case in 2014, in which Kaplan ruled that the case in Ecuador was invalid because Donziger had achieved the case result through various offenses against legal ethics, including "egregious fraud" and racketeering. A Wall Street Journalopinion column notes that a panel at the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in the United States upheld this ruling in 2016, and that appeals courts in Argentina and Brazil’s Superior Court of Justice rejected Donziger's petitions. The case relied in large part on the testimony of Alberto Guerra, a former Ecuadorean judge who alleged that Donziger had arranged him to ghostwrite the verdict of the lawsuit against Chevron, the case's judge would sign it, and the two would split $500,000 given by the plaintiffs, lead by Donziger. In Kaplan's conclusion of the case, he highlighted this as primary evidence for the racketeering charge.
Appeals and prosecution of Donziger
As part of the appeal process after the initial ruling, Donziger was ordered by Kaplan to submit his cellphone and computer as evidence. Donziger refused, arguing that doing so would violate the attorney-client privilege of his other clients, and was charged with contempt of court by Kaplan. In a move described as "virtually unprecedented" by The Intercept, Kaplan appointed a private law firm to prosecute Donziger after the Southern District Court of New York declined to do so; Donziger is under house arrest awaiting trial. Donziger's contempt charge and house arrest have been harshly condemned by legal advocates. Harvard Law School professor Charles Nesson criticized Chevron and Kaplan, asserting that the corruption and bribery was a "means to protect the oil company from having to answer for its degradation of the Amazon." In 2020, a group of twenty-nine Nobel laureates condemned "judicial harassment" by Chevron and urged the release of Donziger. Human rights campaigners have described the treatment of Donziger as an example of a strategic lawsuit against public participation, which are used to censor, intimidate, and silence critics by burdening them with the cost of a legal defense until they abandon their criticism or opposition.
