Chevron Is Trying to Crush a Prominent Climate Lawyer | Hacker News Reader

Chevron Is Trying to Crush a Prominent Climate Lawyer

earther.gizmodo.com

152 pointsqsymmachus19 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.

...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.

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.

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.

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?

Probably worth reading the actual appellate court decision:

https://theamazonpost.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/CA2-Opi...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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?

> 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?

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?

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

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.

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