More than 30 Democratic lawmakers on Wednesday sentenced outgoing U.S. President Joe Biden to nearly 1,000 days in jail and house arrest after successfully representing Ecuadorians harmed by Big Oil’s pollution of the Amazon rainforest. He called for a pardon for environmental and human rights lawyer Stephen Donziger, who endured the crime.
In a letter to Mr. Biden led by Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), 33 Democrats in both chambers of Congress and independent Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vermont) called out the “troubling issues” in the Donziger case. “Legal misconduct,” he said, “and has been criticized as follows.” Three federal judges, 68 Nobel laureates, and five senior jurists on the Working Group on Arbitrarity found it unconstitutional or illegal. United Nations detention. ”
Mr. Donziger was a member of Ecuador’s farmers and indigenous groups in a 1990s lawsuit against Texaco (later acquired by Chevron) over the oil company’s intentional dumping of billions of gallons of carcinogenic waste into the Amazon. represented. He played a key role in winning a $9.5 billion settlement against Chevron in an Ecuadorian court.
But Chevron fought Donziger in the U.S. court system, and U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan, who had invested in Chevron, held him on a misdemeanor count of contempt of court after the lawyer refused to disclose privileged customer information to the company. The judgment was held. Loretta Preska, the judge Kaplan handpicked to preside over Donziger’s contempt trial, is affiliated with the Chevron-funded Federalist Society.
Donziger’s case has drawn global attention and solidarity, with human rights experts and free speech groups joining progressive U.S. lawmakers in demanding his release. He was released in April 2022 after 993 days of imprisonment and house arrest.
“Mr. Donziger is the only attorney in U.S. history to be imprisoned for a period of time for contempt of court,” the 34 senators wrote. “We believe the harsh nature of the case against Mr. Donziger and the harshness of his punishment are directly tied to his previous work with Chevron. We do not want to trivialize this accusation. I don’t do it without supporting it with evidence.”
Lawmakers warned:
Despite the personal hardship this unprecedented legal proceeding has imposed on Mr. Donziger and his family, we hope that this lawsuit will help all the advocates who work on behalf of other frontline communities, human rights abuses, and more. We are deeply concerned about the chilling effect it will have on victims of the pandemic and on those people. In search of environmental justice. Those trying to help vulnerable communities will find that intimidation tactics at the hands of powerful corporate interests and, most troublingly, U.S. courts will succeed in suppressing strong legal representation when it is most needed. It will feel like. This sends a dangerous signal.
“Pardoning Mr. Donziger sends a strong message to the world that multibillion-dollar corporations cannot afford to protect public interest lawyers and their clients with impunity,” the lawmakers said. Probably,” he added.
Lawmakers join more than 100 environmental and human rights groups in asking Biden to pardon Donziger.
“This pardon is necessary because I am the only person in American history to have been privately prosecuted by a corporation,” Donziger argued in an opinion piece published by Common Dreams in April.
“More specifically, the government (through pro-business judges) has given a giant oil company (Chevron) the power to prosecute and detain its most prominent critics,” he continued. “As a result of this unprecedented and horrific private prosecution, I am still unable to travel internationally, prohibited from meeting with clients I have represented for over 30 years, and prohibited from practicing law. , unable to maintain a bank account or earn an income’ for a living. ”
Donziger added: “No matter where you are on the political spectrum, I think we can all agree that what happened to me should never happen to anyone in any country that abides by the rule of law. ” he added.
Appeals for Donziger’s pardon come from a variety of people, from WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden to Leonard Pelletier, America’s longest-serving indigenous activist. It comes amid a wave of Biden’s 11th-hour pleas. Incarcerated political prisoners and federal death row inmates, including Billy Jerome Allen, who advocates say were wrongly convicted of murder.
