Steven R. Donziger | |
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Occupation | Human rights lawyer |
Oct 28, 2021 · Shannon Stapleton/Reuters By Isabella Grullón Paz Oct. 27, 2021 Steven Donziger, the environmental and human rights lawyer who won a $9.5 billion settlement against Chevron over oil dumped in...
Jul 27, 2021 · Lawyer Steven Donziger found guilty of withholding evidence in Chevron case Lawyer now faces six months in jail following a decades-long battle against the oil company Steven Donziger, a lawyer who...
Oct 28, 2021 · Steven Donziger, an environmental lawyer who won a $9.5 billion settlement against Chevron over oil pollution in Amazon rainforest Indigenous lands, has said his imprisonment will "backfire."
Feb 04, 2022 · By Corruption By Cops On Feb 3, 2022 Steven Donziger, the environmental and human rights lawyer who won a $9.5 billion settlement against Chevron over oil dumped in Indigenous lands in the Amazon rainforest, surrendered himself to the federal authorities on Wednesday to begin a six-month prison sentence.
The former attorney, Steven Donziger, won the judgment against Chevron in 2011 from an Ecuadorian court on behalf of a group including indigenous people. Chevron, in turn, filed a civil racketeering lawsuit against Donziger in the U.S., alleging that he had obtained the judgment through fraud and bribery. In 2014, a federal judge in Manhattan ...
(Bloomberg) -- A disbarred lawyer who won a stunning, and ultimately thwarted, $8.6 billion judgment against Chevron Corp. over contamination of the Amazon rainforest went on trial Monday on criminal contempt charges -- even after prosecutors declined to pursue the case.
He faces a sentence as long as six months in jail on the misdemeanor contempt charges, after spending the past 20 months under court-ordered home confinement while waiting for his trial.
After Glavin, Martin Garbus, a lawyer for Donziger, began by focusing on Chevron’s role in prompting the criminal charges against his client and on the government’s decision not to go forward with the case. He referred to Glavin as “the Chevron prosecutor.”.
It was postponed several times by the pandemic and other issues. “Steven Donziger, the defendant in this case, intentionally and repeatedly disobeyed court order after court order after court order,” prosecutor Rita Marie Glavin said in her opening statement on Monday.
Chevron caused a mass industrial poisoning of the Amazon.”. If convicted, Donziger would likely argue that he deserves no time in jail and that his time in home confinement should be applied to reduce any sentence. Read More: Chevron Wins Judgment Against Ex-Lawyer Who Sued in Ecuador.
Few news outlets covered the detention of Steven Donziger, who won a multibillion-dollar judgment in Ecuador against Chevron over the massive contamination in the Lago Agrio region and has been fighting on behalf of Indigenous people and farmers there for more than 25 years.
In another legal peculiarity, in July, Kaplan appointed a private law firm to prosecute Donziger, after the Southern District of New York declined to do so — a move that is virtually unprecedented. And, as Donziger’s lawyer has pointed out, the firm Kaplan chose, Seward & Kissel, likely has ties to Chevron.
Instead, that case was decided solely by Kaplan, who ruled in 2014 that the Ecuadorian judgment against Chevron was invalid because it was obtained through “ egregious fraud ” and that Donziger was guilty of racketeering, extortion, wire fraud, money laundering, obstruction of justice, and witness tampering.
The Chevron case may be most devastating for the plaintiffs in the Amazon, who never received their judgment despite being left with hundreds of unlined waste pits and contaminated water and soil from millions of gallons of spilled crude oil and billions of gallons of dumped toxic waste.
So on August 6, Donziger left a Lower Manhattan courthouse unnoticed and boarded the 1 train home with an electronic monitoring device newly affixed to his ankle. Save for the occasional meeting with his lawyer or other court-sanctioned appointment, he has remained there ever since.
The company sued him in New York, and now he’s under house arrest. Steven Donziger sits for a portrait at his home in Manhattan, N.Y., where he is on house arrest. Photo: Annie Tritt for The Intercept.
The twisted legal saga began in 1993, when Donziger and other attorneys filed a class-action suit in New York against Texaco on behalf of more than 30,000 farmers and Indigenous people in the Amazon over massive contamination from the company’s oil drilling there.
From left, Harry Reasoner, Joe Jamail and Darrell Royal at the University of Texas in 2003.
Long known as the King of Torts, Mr. Jamail worked on a contingency fee basis, usually one-third of the award, and earned $10 million to $25 million a year in the decade before the Pennzoil case.
The case, in which Pennzoil accused Texaco of improperly interfering with its 1984 deal to buy part of Getty Oil, was Mr. Jamail’s first on behalf of a major corporate client, and it elevated him overnight from the lone star of Texas courtrooms to near-mythical status in American jurisprudence.
Unable even to post a bond to cover the award during appeals, Texaco filed for bankruptcy and settled the case for $3 billion in 1987. Mr. Jamail’s fee was said to be $345 million.
He was 90. The University of Texas, where he was a major benefactor, confirmed his death on its website. Mr. Jamail’s specialty was personal injury cases — people hurt in accidents or by commercial products — and over five decades he won more than 500 lawsuits and $13 billion in judgments and settlements for his clients.
Rodolfo Gonzalez/American-Statesman. “I overtrained,” he said. His first job was at Fulbright, Crooker, Freeman, Bates & Jaworski, a politically connected white-shoe law firm in Houston, whose best-known partner, Leon Jaworski, was later the special prosecutor in the Watergate scandal.
Joe Jamail, a celebrated Texas lawyer who had flunked civil negligence in law school and barely passed the bar exam but went on to dazzle his profession by winning gargantuan judgments — including Pennzoil’s $10.5 billion award against Texaco in 1985, then the largest in history — died on Wednesday in Houston. He was 90.
Chip Robertson, a former chief justice of the Missouri Supreme Court , said that many have tried to do what Moore is doing and given up. "Mike's not afraid of anybody because Mike believes that he's doing the right thing," said Robertson. A veteran of Moore's winning fight against Big Tobacco, he has now joined Moore's team ...
He's recruited 23 state attorney generals so far.
May 8, 201800:58. Moore calls pharmaceutical companies "pretty evil" and claims that they intentionally lied about the addictive properities of their drugs. Since 2014, he and his cohorts have filed multiple suits against manufacturers of prescription opioids.
Purdue told NBC that Moore's assessment is "deeply flawed," claiming that its drug oxycontin represents less than two percent of current opioid prescriptions. According to Purdue, "illegal trafficking and abuse of heroin and illicit fentanyl" is the real culprit inAmerica's opioid epidemic.