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Comment by rce | Hacker News Reader

Why is it insane? The article said he fabricated and withheld evidence and won the case via bribery and fraud. I'm not familiar with this case, but that seems to be the findings of the court

Oil polluters should be held responsible for their acts. At the same time, bribery, fraud, withholding and fabricating evidence must also not be allowed to stand

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The article says that Chevron has accused him of those things. Chevron, to my mind, is not a famously honest company, and the fact that the US Attorney for the SDNY declined to case suggests that this might be more scorched earth by a large corporation than about actual justice.

The NY Times article says the judge appointed the law firm, not Chevron as this article claims.

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

It may have been a judge that appointed the firm, but it's kind of suspicious that he would appoint a firm that had previously represented Chevron to represent the US Government. That seems like a pretty big conflict of interest.

That’s not a conflict of interest - the prosecution is supposed to be “against” the defendant.

Maybe so, but on behalf of its client, the government? The court? Not on behalf of someone else who is not paying. Hard to imagine there was no other law firm that would take this job, and if not then that’s one more negative sign for validity of prosecution, right?

see the interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKbpptFKaXc

The judge’s selection is the conflict of interest, not the prosecution itself. Selecting a private firm that’s financially entangled with the aggrieved party to discharge the duties of the Department of Justice is extremely unusual and concerning.

I've never heard of this kind of thing happening before. I wonder how close Kaplan is to Chevron.

It’s very rare for a disbarred lawyer to spend 7 years ignoring court orders. Kaplan is really pissed off and wants consequences.

I find it weird that in the US law system a private company can prosecute someone. What's next? Hiring private judges and juries?

Not that surprising when you remember the private prisons.

It can't. The NYT article says:

> 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.

So the real problem here is people not reading the article, jumping to conclusions, and spreading misinformation in the comments (on HN?!). And probably the SDNY being too biased to enforce the law against a lawyer who cheated in a case against an oil company. Anyone who's been following the SDNY in the news for a while shouldn't be surprised about that.

The US courts also found that he had, in fact, done those things. Their main evidence for this was internal e-mails and memos by Donzinger and his colleagues where they talked about, planned, and carried out exactly those actions. (I read the ruling back when this last came up on HN.)

Here's from the Wikipedia article on the judge (Kaplan).

> Kaplan has been accused of displaying a pro-corporate bias in the case.[12] At the hearing, Alberto Guerra, a former Ecuadorian judge, testified for Chevron, claiming Donziger bribed him and others to win the case by fraud. Guerra's testimony was cited by Kaplan as a key factor in his decision. In 2015, Guerra claimed his testimony against Donziger had been largely a lie.[13]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_A._Kaplan#Chevron_vs_Don...

He says he was put under house arrest for appealing the handing over of his laptop because it has his clients confidential information on it.

interview : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKbpptFKaXc

one of these things is not like the other.

Being accused of bribery by Chevron (a company as dirty as they come) is all the evidence you need, huh?

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