The Supreme Court refused Monday to contemplate the appeal of a disbarred lawyer jailed for contempt of court after he won a $9.5 billion judgment against Chevron in an environmental lawsuit in Ecuador.
The attorney, Steven Donziger, was sentenced to 6 months in jail for failing to comply with a judge’s order to give up all of his electronic devices.
He had asked the Supreme Court to take the case with the argument that a federal district court judge overstepped his legal authority in appointing three lawyers as special prosecutors to handle his contempt trial after the U.S. Attorney in Manhattan declined to prosecute him.
Two conservative justices, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, dissented from the choice, saying they might have the Supreme Court accept the appeal by Donziger,
Gorsuch, in his blunt written dissent, suggested that the appointment of special prosecutors by the judge violated the Structure’s separation of powers of branches of presidency, which supplies the manager branch the facility to lodge criminal cases, and the judiciary the facility to interpret the laws.
“On this country, judges don’t have any more power to initiate a prosecution of those that come before them than prosecutors have to take a seat in judgment of those they charge,” Gorsuch wrote.
“Our Structure doesn’t tolerate what happened here,” he added.
The opposite justices who voted to disclaim Donziger a hearing of his appeal didn’t explain their decision in writing, as is customary.
The case stems from a lawsuit alleging many years of pollution of South American Amazon region’s rain forests and rivers by Texaco, a company predecessor to Chevron.
A gaggle of Ecuadorians represented by Donziger filed a class-action suit against Chevron in Manhattan federal court in 1993.
“At the corporate’s insistence, the court transferred the litigation to Ecuador,” Gorsuch wrote in his five-page dissent.
“Later, Chevron got here to regret that move,” Gorsuch noted.
The plaintiffs within the lawsuit were awarded $9.5 billion from Chevron by a judge in Ecuador.
Chevron then filed a legal motion in Manhattan federal court and won an injunction against the enforcement of the judgment in any U.S. court.
The corporate also obtained a so-called constructive trust on all assets Donziger had received because of this of the judgment in Ecuador.
Manhattan federal Judge Lewis Kaplan in an almost 500-page ruling in 2014 wrote that Donziger and Ecuadorian lawyers “corrupted” the lawsuit in Ecuador.
Kaplan said the lawyers had, amongst other things, submitted fraudulent evidence, coerced a judge to make use of a supposedly impartial expert whose report was ghost-written by a Colorado consulting firm Donziger paid, after which guarantees $500,000 “to the Ecuadorian judge to rule of their favor and sign their judgment.”
To implement the hold that Kaplan had placed on assets Donziger received in reference to the Ecuador judgment, he ordered Donziger to give up all of his electronic devices in order that they could possibly be imaged.
After Donziger failed to completely comply with that order, Kaplan held him in criminal contempt of court, and referred that case to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, which normally prosecutes such matters.
Nonetheless, the Manhattan U.S. Attorney declined to take the case.
Kaplan then appointed three lawyers as special prosecutors and held trial with no jury for Donziger, whom he then convicted and sentenced to jail.
Donziger had objected to Kaplan’s actions, arguing that a judge had no right to override a federal prosecutor’s discretion in deciding to not prosecute a case.
However the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit upheld his conviction.
In his dissent Monday, Justice Gorsuch noted that the Supreme Court within the late Nineteen Eighties “approved using court-appointed prosecutors as a “last resort” in certain criminal contempt cases.”
“But that call has met with considerable criticism,” Gorsuch added. “As Members of this Court have put it, the Structure gives courts the facility to ‘function a neutral adjudicator in a criminal case,’ not ‘the facility to prosecute crimes.'”
Within the Chevron case, Gorsuch wrote, “Nonetheless much the district court can have thought Mr. Donziger warranted punishment, the prosecution on this case broke a basic constitutional promise essential to our
liberty.”