American human rights attorney Steven Donziger, who spent decades battling Chevron as part of a multibillion-dollar oil pollution case in Ecuador, is seeking a pardon from the Biden administration.
Donziger spent 993 days in home detention in Manhattan, which ended two years ago, on a criminal contempt charge after he refused to turn over his computer, phone and legal files to Chevron.
The confinement, four times longer than the maximum allowed for typical contempt offenses, was the result of a New York racketeering case Chevron brought against the attorney, whom the company accused of bribing an Ecuadorian judge, which he denies.
Donziger won a landmark $9.5 billion judgement in 2011 against the oil giant on claims a corporate predecessor deliberately dumped oil waste in indigenous communities in the Amazon.
Donziger told The Guardian on Thursday that a pardon from Biden would “send a clear signal to corporations that they can never again criminally prosecute and jail good people who hold them accountable for abuses.”
He added: “Even though detention ended, I’m still not free.”
Donziger was disbarred as part of his contempt conviction, and is unable to leave the US.
The Biden administration has already made liberal use of the presidential pardon power, with Biden pardoning his son Hunter, non-violent offenders, and thousands of people convicted of federal marijuana offenses.
On December 11, a group of 34 members of Congress urged Biden in a letter to also pardon Donziger, calling the charges against the attorney “highly suspect” and warning they could set a “chilling” precedent for future human rights and environmental cases. They pointed to a 2021 opinion from the United Nations Human Rights Council finding Donziger’s punishment violated the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, among other criticisms.
“Mr. Donziger is the only lawyer in U.S. history to be subject to any period of detention on a misdemeanor contempt of court charge,” the lawmakers wrote. “We believe that the legal case against Mr. Donziger, as well as the excessively harsh nature of the punishment against him, are directly tied to his prior work against Chevron.”
The Independent has contacted the White House for comment.
Donziger made a similar argument himself earlier this year in an interview with The Independent.
“This paradigm terrifies the industry,” he said of his original judgement against Chevron, which the company has never paid.
“They’re used to normal legal cases, and they just smash them. They win almost all of their cases because they just crush people. This is a new kind of thing, and the liability they’re facing on a global scale is in the trillions of dollars,” he added. “The model represents an existential threat to the industry, and that is why they are trying to destroy me.”
Chevron argues it has been released of liability in the Ecuador case after it paid $40 million for clean-up efforts in 1998, and that the remaining pollution can be blamed on the country’s state oil company.
“The Ecuador lawsuit is a well-documented fraud and Steven Donziger is an adjudicated racketeer who was convicted of criminal contempt,” the company previously told The Independent.
“He was disbarred for ‘egregious professional misconduct’ in the Ecuador case, including fraud, bribery, and coercion. His indigenous Ecuadorian clients fired him years ago for refusing to disclose how he spent tens of millions of dollars raised in their name,” the company added. They noted additionally that multiple courts have declined to enforce what they call “the illegitimate Ecuadorian judgement.”
