Steven Donziger has been under house arrest for over 580 days, awaiting trial on a misdemeanor charge. It’s all, he says, because he beat a multinational energy corporation in court.

Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, a former corporate lawyer whose clients included tobacco companies, became Donziger's judge-and-jury in the RICO case. He heard from 31 witnesses, but based his ruling in significant part on the testimony of Albert Guerra, a former Ecuadorian judge whom Chevron relocated to the U.S. at an overall cost of $2 million. Guerra alleged there was a bribe involved in the Ecuadorian court's judgement against Chevron. He has since retracted some of his testimony, admitting it was false.

But Kaplan, who refused to look at the scientific evidence in the original case, ruled the initial verdict was the result of fraud. And he didn't stop there. He ordered Donziger to pay millions in attorneys fees to Chevron and eventually ordered him to turn over decades of client communications, even going after his phone and computer. Donziger considered this a threat to attorney-client privilege and appealed the ruling, but while that appeal was pending, Kaplan slapped him with a contempt of court charge for refusing to give up the devices. When the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York declined to prosecute the case, Kaplan took the extraordinary step of appointing a private law firm to prosecute Donziger in the name of the U.S. government. The firm, Seward & Kissel, has had a number of oil-and-gas clients, including, in 2018... Chevron. Kaplan bypassed the usual random case-assignment procedure of the federal judiciary and handpicked a judge to hear the contempt case: Loretta Preska, a member of the Federalist Society, among whose major donors is... Chevron. Preska has, like Kaplan, rejected Donziger's requests to have his trial heard by a jury of his peers. Both judges declined Esquire's request for comment on Donziger's cases, citing court policy.

At this point, the details of Chevron's conduct in the Amazon are very far in the rearview. So are the allegations against Donziger with respect to his conduct in the initial case, though he has been disbarred based on Kaplan’s ruling. (A "special referee" appointed by the Supreme Court of New York, John Horan, found his law license should be reinstated, although the Appellate Division rejected those findings and that matter is still on appeal.) The question at hand is whether he should have an ankle bracelet on.

RICO was created to prosecute organized crime, but is a common go-to when no other laws are applicable.

Contempt of court bypasses the usual protections of a speedy trial, it is rarely abused but when it does there is very little constraint on the judge.

Commentators have written about judges as bullies, and in their accounts one of the main judicial bullying weapons is the threat of contempt directed toward criminal defense lawyers.

I was curious about activity following the Esquire article, and then got suspicious about the highly Google-ranked Chevron propaganda ad claiming fraud on Donziger's part.

More explanation of the current Chevron actions is here: https://www.dailydot.com/debug/steven-donziger-chevron-google/

Will Menacker interviewing Steven for Chapo Trap House is worth a listen. Truly shocking and grim capitalist corruption.

Well, in the hierarchy of American norms, petroleum does outranks the Constitution.