
Chevron Is Trying to Crush a Prominent Climate Lawyer - qsymmachus
https://earther.gizmodo.com/chevron-is-trying-to-crush-a-prominent-climate-lawyer-a-1844685508
======
wombatmobile
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](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
...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
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
The judge admitted that before the appellate court ruling:

[https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160808006005/en/U.S...](https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160808006005/en/U.S.-Appeals-
Court-Affirms-RICO-Judgment-Lawyer)

[https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/neye7z/chevrons-star-
witn...](https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/neye7z/chevrons-star-witness-
admits-to-lying-in-the-amazon-pollution-case)

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

~~~
knl
Isn’t then the court statement illogical? The judge admitted he lied, yet the
appellate court states that they uphold the original verdict because Dozinger
bribed the judge?

~~~
darawk
Probably worth reading the actual appellate court decision:

[https://theamazonpost.com/wp-
content/uploads/2016/08/CA2-Opi...](https://theamazonpost.com/wp-
content/uploads/2016/08/CA2-Opinion.pdf)

Notably, their appeal didn't even challenge the factual findings of the lower
court with regards to their own corruption. So, there isn't even any real
dispute about that. They did obtain the verdict corruptly, what they attempted
to challenge was the legal authority of the lower court to overturn the
Ecuadorian decision, and the appellate court rejected that.

~~~
wombatmobile
Any thoughts, darawk, about the "more than 16 million gallons of crude oil, 80
times more oil than was spilled in BP’s 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster."? You
do know that the oil wasn't "spilled" in the Amazon forest, don't you? It was
placed in unlined pits, which were never rehabilitated.

~~~
darawk
I think it sounds like a bad thing, but it also seems that Chevron claims to
have remediated it, and it's a little unclear what the real facts of the
situation are at this point.

~~~
makomk
Yeah, and if I'm following all this correctly, part of the basis for the US
court rulings is that the Ecuadorian court-appointed experts found that Texaco
(now part of Chevron) had in fact remediated the first few sites that were
inspected, and that the lawyer in question apparently got around this by using
extremely dubious methods to get the court to cancel the remaining inspections
and appoint a single "independent" expert instead who secretly let the
plaintiffs write their report. The "controversial discovery process" seems to
have turned up a whole bunch of e-mails and video records of this happening,
and if I'm understanding the ruling correctly, Donziger even admitted to a lot
of this in his own testimony and depositions to the US courts.

I'm no legal expert, but I'm pretty sure it's a bad sign when your attorney
doesn't want documents disclosed to the court because "the effects are
potentially devastating in Ecuador (apart from destroying the proceeding, all
of us, your attorneys, might go to jail)"... and then that e-mail gets
obtained by the court.

------
marcus_holmes
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
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
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.

------
hjek
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...](https://soundcloud.com/chapo-trap-house/418-the-cool-zone-feat-steven-
donziger-41119)

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

------
SpicyLemonZest
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
> 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?

~~~
SpicyLemonZest
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?

~~~
knl
Maybe if you read the article and follow the provided links, it would be
revealed to you ;)

