On April 22, 2024, the Supreme Court declined to hear Steven Donziger's appeal. No opinion, no noted dissent — just a line on the order list, and with it the end of the last legal challenge to the strangest prosecution an American lawyer has faced in living memory: a criminal case brought not by the government, which refused to bring it, but by a private law firm whose client list included the corporation he had beaten in court.
Donziger represented 30,000 residents of the Ecuadorian Amazon in litigation over the oil contamination Texaco left behind in the 1970s and 80s. In 2011 his clients won a $9.5 billion judgment in Ecuadorian court. Chevron, which had absorbed Texaco, answered the judgment by suing Donziger personally in New York under the civil RICO statute, before U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan.
A private prosecution
The criminal case grew out of that civil one. In 2019, Judge Kaplan held Donziger in criminal contempt for refusing to surrender his electronic devices and privileged client communications while he appealed the order. The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York reviewed the referral and declined to prosecute. Kaplan then did something without precedent in a case of this profile: he appointed a private firm, Seward & Kissel, to prosecute Donziger in the government's name. The firm had represented Chevron as recently as 2018.
Convicted in 2021 of the misdemeanor contempt charges, Donziger was sentenced to six months. By the time he finished serving it — pandemic home detention, then the Federal Correctional Institution at Danbury — he had spent nearly 1,000 days under detention or house arrest for an offense whose maximum sentence he had nearly tripled in pretrial restriction alone. The U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention reviewed the case in 2021, found the detention arbitrary, and called for his release. The United States rejected the finding.
His appeal posed a clean constitutional question: can a federal judge appoint a private firm — one with a financial relationship to the defendant's adversary — to wield the criminal power of the United States? The National Lawyers Guild, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the International Bar Association, hundreds of human-rights organizations, and several Nobel Peace laureates filed in support. The Second Circuit said yes in 2023. The Supreme Court's cert denial in April 2024 left that answer standing without ever engaging it.
What remains
Donziger remains disbarred in New York, a status in place since 2020. He continues to write and organize about the contamination and about what his case demonstrates. The pollution in the Ecuadorian Amazon remains where Texaco left it; Chevron has paid nothing of the 2011 judgment.
The ledger is worth stating plainly. A lawyer won a multibillion-dollar environmental judgment against an oil major, and for it spent almost three years in custody or confinement under a prosecution his own government declined to bring, conducted by a firm connected to his opponent, upheld by the courts at every level, and finally waved past by the Supreme Court without comment. Every environmental and human-rights lawyer weighing a case against a major corporate adversary now practices in the shadow of that outcome — which was, from the beginning, the point of producing it.
