U.S. Supreme Court lets Chevron foe Donziger’s contempt conviction stand
(Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court yesterday declined to hear a disbarred environmental lawyer’s challenge to his criminal contempt conviction after he earlier won but was unable to collect a $9.5 billion judgment against Chevron Corp CVX.N over oil pollution in Ecuadorian rainforests.
The court turned away an appeal by Steven Donziger, who has argued that his prosecution violated his rights under the U.S. Constitution because private lawyers appointed by a federal judge handled the case against him after the U.S. Justice Department declined to do so.
Donziger’s lawyers argued that this appointment violated separation-of-powers principles set out in the Constitution delineating the authority of the three branches of the U.S. government. They maintained that the executive branch, not the judiciary, should have pursued any prosecution.
The New York-based 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last year concluded that U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan possessed the authority to appoint the prosecutors, who nonetheless remained subject to supervision by the U.S. attorney general.
Two members of the Supreme Court’s 6-3 conservative majority, Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, dissented from the decision to not hear the appeal, with Gorsuch saying that the Constitution “does not tolerate what happened here.”
“However much the district court may have thought Mr. Donziger warranted punishment, the prosecution in this case broke a basic constitutional promise essential to our liberty,” Gorsuch wrote.
Donziger on Twitter called the Supreme Court’s decision to not hear his case “a huge blow to the rule of law.” Steve Vladeck, a University of Texas School of Law professor who represented Donziger, said Gorsuch’s dissent “says just about everything I’d say.”
Donziger was sentenced to six months in jail in 2021 after U.S. District Judge Loretta Preska in Manhattan found him guilty of misdemeanor contempt for defying court orders arising from a lawsuit filed by Chevron.