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Steven Donziger, the environmental and human legal rights attorney who won a $9.5 billion settlement against Chevron more than oil dumped in Indigenous lands in the Amazon rainforest, surrendered himself to the federal authorities on Wednesday to commence a 6-thirty day period jail sentence.
Mr. Donziger was discovered guilty in August 2019 of six counts of felony contempt of court for withholding proof in a prolonged, complex legal fight with Chevron, which statements that Mr. Donziger fabricated proof in the 1990s to gain a lawsuit he submitted from the oil big on behalf of 30,000 Indigenous individuals in Ecuador. The convictions led to Mr. Donziger’s becoming disbarred past 12 months.
Late Wednesday afternoon, Mr. Donziger turned himself in to a federal prison in Danbury, Conn., wherever he will serve his 6-thirty day period sentence. He experienced previously expended a lot more than 800 days underneath house detention immediately after the court cited flight-possibility considerations, his lawyer, Ronald L. Kuby, stated on Wednesday.
“After 100 web pages of lawful briefing, the appellate courtroom currently denied my launch in 10 terms,” Mr. Donziger said on Twitter on Tuesday. “This is not owing process of legislation. Nor is it justice.”
“We will get by this,” he extra.
Reps for Chevron did not instantly reply to requests for comment.
On July 31, 2019, Decide Lewis A. Kaplan of the U.S. District Court in Manhattan, a former company law firm, tried to cost Mr. Donziger with contempt of court docket dependent on his refusals in 2014 to give the court docket obtain to many years of client communications on gadgets like his mobile phone and his computer system. That 12 months, Choose Kaplan supported Chevron’s complaint in a 500-webpage ruling discovering that Mr. Donziger and his associates had engaged in a conspiracy and prison perform by ghostwriting an environmental report utilised as a essential piece of evidence and bribing a judge in Ecuador.
Right after the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York declined to prosecute the scenario, Judge Kaplan took the exceptional stage of appointing a non-public legislation business, Seward & Kissel, to prosecute Mr. Donziger in the name of the U.S. govt, Mr. Kuby explained.
Updated
Oct. 27, 2021, 5:17 p.m. ET
Seward & Kissel has represented a lot of oil and fuel providers throughout the many years, together with Chevron in 2018.
Misdemeanor prison contempt carries a greatest sentence of 1 year. If the penalty is extra than 6 months for this kind of demand, Mr. Kuby mentioned, a defendant would get a demo by jury. Even following multiple objections by Mr. Donziger, Choose Loretta A. Preska lowered the sentencing to six months — it experienced formerly been established to a year — and denied Mr. Donziger’s ask for for a jury demo.
In August, Choose Preska located Mr. Donziger guilty of all charges. On Oct. 1, Mr. Donziger was sentenced to 6 months in jail, a day after he asked the courtroom to contemplate an viewpoint by independent United Nations professionals that found his court docket-purchased household confinement of additional than two decades a violation of intercontinental human rights regulation.
Judge Preska agreed to not incarcerate Mr. Donziger immediately, offering him a opportunity to appeal. In a court order on Oct. 12, Choose Preska declared that if Mr. Donziger’s attraction failed, he would have to surrender himself in 24 hrs of the choice.
In 1993, Mr. Donziger sued the Chevron Company for oil spills that experienced a detrimental result on the Amazonian location of Ecuador. Mr. Donziger has argued that Texaco, which was acquired by Chevron in 2001, reduce by way of the Amazon, spilled oil into pristine rain forests and left powering a toxic mess.
At the time, Chevron claimed Mr. Donziger fabricated specifics for his own finishes, blaming the corporation for air pollution primarily caused by Petroecuador, the national oil business that was after a spouse of Texaco and continues to generate oil in the location.
Chevron has prolonged argued that a 1998 settlement that Texaco signed with Ecuador just after a $40 million cleanup absolves it of liability. It contends that Ecuador’s condition-run oil firm is responsible for considerably of the air pollution in the oil patch that Texaco left in the 1970s.
