Four Years Later: Reflections On Becoming A Corporate Political Prisoner In the United States

Four years ago this week Chevron forced me into prison for helping Amazon communities win a landmark $10 billion pollution case in Ecuador. The company has not paid and I'm still not fully free.

Chevron’s vicious legal attacks resulted in me being convicted by a pro-corporate U.S. judge (Loretta Preska) who let company lawyers prosecute me directly in the name of the government. I’m with our son Matthew, then 15, outside the Manhattan courthouse just after Preska sentenced me to prison on October 1, 2021. I was the first lawyer in New York ever to be forced into prison on a misdemeanor contempt of court charge.

(Chevron might have taken my law license, but I still use my voice to battle injustice. This platform is one of the ways I generate income since Chevron wiped out my bank accounts after our victory in the landmark pollution case in Ecuador. Please consider a paid subscription. — Steven)

Want to hear an interesting story? I don’t talk about this too much, but I want to share some intimate details of how I became a corporate political prisoner.

This week marks four years since Chevron forced me into prison in the United States in retaliation for helping Amazon communities win a landmark $10 billion pollution case in Ecuador. That was a particularly challenging time for me, my family, and the Ecuadorian communities who continue to suffer because of Chevron’s deliberate dumping of billions of gallons of cancer-causing oil waste into the Amazon ecosystem. I want to share some brief reflections on what happened and what it might mean.

I know we face major challenges in the world — the struggle against the Trump regime and the battle for Palestinian self-determination are top of mind — but I don’t want to forget what we went through as Chevron with the help of two federal judges slowly and methodically over several years turned me into a corporate political prisoner. They did this through many techniques, large and small, usually applied incrementally so it would not be too obvious. The techniques were largely obfuscated by the technical esoterica of the law so even sophisticated observers would have a hard time noticing what was happening. It’s the art of the legalized persecution. What most would call Kafkaesque. The more I and my clients resisted, the more they upped the ante and came at us from fresh angles. The goal was to grind us down so we would give up. But we would not. In fact, each blow they landed only seemed to make me and the community leaders in Ecuador more determined.

Our refusal to give up infuriated Chevron. The company had hired 60 law firms and used 2,000 lawyers on the case, and it was not working.

It finally got to the point when the judges authorized private Chevron lawyers to prosecute me criminally in the name of the government on a petty criminal contempt charge. The charge was filed by a judge after I appealed his clearly unprecedented and likely illegal order that I turn over my computer and confidential case file to Chevron. I believe the charge was baseless — more on that below. Most notable is that the federal prosecutor in Manhattan at the time (Goeffrey Berman), who had been appointed by Trump in his first term, analyzed the charge and refused to bring the case. Because judges are not allowed to prosecute criminal cases — that is the exclusive domain of the executive branch prosecutors — the decision not to prosecute should have been the end of it. But that was not Chevron’s plan. It was clear that they (Chevron and the complicit judges) wanted me neutralized and concluded that orchestrating my detention through a baseless criminal case designed to look real was one of the few options left.

Let me repeat: I was prosecuted criminally by a fossil fuel company in the name of the US government. That’s why I consider myself a corporate political prisoner. To be clear, this appears to be the only private corporate criminal prosecution in US history. (For more detail, see this article and this interview I did with Jacobin Magazine.) As a result of this private prosecution, to this day I am not fully free. I still have no law license — it was taken under pressure from Chevron without a hearing after the bar committee declared me an “immediate threat” to the public order. I still must deal with all sorts of restrictions that limit my work and life options. Those details I’ll reserve for another article.

So what does this private corporate prosecution mean?

In many ways, what happened to me was a precursor to the increased level of political persecution we are now seeing today in this country and around the world. But the technique as applied to me had a peculiar characteristic: the attacks were carried out not by the Department of Justice, but by a private corporation with the complicity of judges who in my view had deeply pro-corporate agendas. (This obviously is my opinion. The judges in question who facilitated the attacks — Lewis A. Kaplan and Loretta Preska — have written extensively and critically about me in opinions that are available online. I’ll note that six appellate courts, including the Supreme Courts of Ecuador and Canada, have issued unanimous opinions upholding the validity of the Ecuador judgment against Chevron.)

One interesting aspect of my experience was that the judicial attacks transcended the political flavor of the moment. My transformation from human rights lawyer to corporate political prisoner began to take root during the Obama Administration. It picked up steam during Trump’s first term, and did not slow during the Biden Administration. In fact, even after I garnered the support of a diverse group of 34 Congresspersons (see the letter), President Biden earlier this year capitulated to Chevron’s pressure and refused to grant me a pardon. That’s after he knew that my contempt conviction and detention had been ruled unconstitutional or illegal by five federal judges and five respected international jurists from the United Nations. (See the UN decision. ) Biden in my view was too weak and indecisive to issue the pardon to an innocent man who spent years trying to right Chevron’s wrongs. It stung even further when hours after Biden’s term ended, Trump pardoned roughly 1,500 people who had stormed the Capitol and tried to overthrow the US government.

I’m posting several photos below that capture some of what we went through as I was criminalized and shoved into a federal prison in October 2021. The one photo at the top of this article is of me with my kind and resilient son, Matthew. It was taken outside of the federal courthouse in Manhattan just minutes after Judge Preska sentenced me to the maximum possible prison term on October 1. I felt like I was on the knife’s edge leaving court that day. Not only was our son’s innocence stolen, I feared if they succeeded in getting me into prison I might not ever come home. What went down with Jeffrey Epstein weighed heavily on my mind. Epstein’s body was found in the Manhattan detention center next door to the courthouse three days after my home detention began in August 2019.

The background to the criminal case is also deeply disturbing.

With the financial risk facing Chevron increasing, Judge Kaplan in 2019 charged me with civil contempt of court for refusing his order that I turn over my computer and confidential case file to the Chevron attorneys. In my view and in the view of many experts, that order was designed to put me in an impossible position: it required me either to violate my ethical duty of confidentiality to my clients (which would have blown up the underlying case), or to violate a court order. So I appealed the court order. While my appeal of Judge Kaplan’s order was pending, Kaplan charged me with criminal contempt of court thereby exposing me to a lengthy prison sentence. He then bypassed court rules requiring random assignment of cases and personally assigned the criminal contempt case to Judge Preska, an ideological ally and leader of the Federalist Society who promptly locked me up pre-trial at home with a GPS ankle bracelet. Due to Kaplan and Preska’s obstinance and their own determination, this pre-trial lock-up without being convicted of a crime lasted over two years on a contempt charge with a maximum sentence of six months in prison.

By the time I got to trial I already has spent more than four times my maximum possible sentence detained at home.

The subsequent trial, which took place in May 2021, was in my opinion pure farce. I explained some of this in an interview I did during my home detention with Amy Goodman from Democracy Now. Preska refused to seat a jury, and she made evidentiary rulings that so hollowed out my defenses that there was no point in even trying to testify. The silver lining is that my excellent lawyers, Ron Kuby and Marty Garbus, exposed what was happening by the arguments they made in court. Preska started to look bad. The reporting suggested serious flaws in the process. Preska even was caught reading a newspaper during witness testimony. Nothing about it seemed fair. An independent commission of trial monitors led by war crimes prosecutor and former U.S. Ambassador Stephen Rapp observed the proceedings and concluded they fell far below minimal standards of due process, and violated various provisions of domestic and international law. (That independent trial monitoring report is here.)

In other words, I was denied a fair trial.

I remember the day of my sentencing vividly. Matthew and my wife Laura Miller were seated in the court gallery just behind me along with friends and supporters. I went to court knowing I might be marched from the courtroom directly into prison after sentencing. Even if I was guilty (and I maintain my innocence), there was no legal justification at that point to make me spend even one more minute incarcerated. I already had served my sentence many times over. Yet Preska, a known Trump supporter whose COVID mask featured an American flag, had other plans. She imposed on me the maximum possible sentence of six months in prison even though I already had served more than four times that amount detained at home.

In front of my family and numerous friends and supporters, Preska spoke to me in a way designed to inflict maximum humiliation. She said I needed to be “hit on the forehead by a 2 by 4” to force me to respect the rule of law. This was ironic given that in the opinion of many jurists, including those from the United Nations, Preska had run roughshod over the law for years. The international jurists from the UN also had ordered the U.S. government to release me and pay me compensation for illegally depriving me of my liberty. (That decision has been ignored by both the Biden and Trump administrations). The UN jurists found an “appalling” level of judicial bias by Judges Kaplan and Preska. This experience was one of the more notable corporate human rights violations in our history — one that in hindsight was a precursor to so much of what we are seeing today.

I want to thank Laura and Matthew for the strength and perseverance. Because of the solidarity of each and every one of you, we grew bigger and stronger. The struggle for justice in Ecuador and for my complete freedom continues in full force. Please look at the pictures below and share this post if you feel inclined. Most of all, thank you for supporting the affected communities of Ecuador and their advocates.

—Steven

I posted this on Twitter just after my sentencing. Several of Matthew’s high school classmates had come to court to offer support. That deeply moved me.

On 27 October 2021 — roughly four weeks after sentencing — I said goodbye to Matthew and Laura before I drove myself to the federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut. It was a 90-minute drive that put the lie to Preska’s claim that I was a risk of flight. The prison guards were stunned when I showed up: I was the only person in a 900-man prison convicted of a misdemeanor. Everybody else there was a felon.

In the lobby of the Danbury federal prison just before being strip-searched and processed in. I hadn’t seen this picture for years until I found it this week. I admittedly look nervous. Given all that had happened to me, I was concerned that once in prison I might not ever get out.

Solidarity from around the world allowed me and my family to get through the 993-day detention experience and grow stronger. After four weeks detained, a close friend gave me advice I will never forget: “Don’t take pharmaceuticals,” she said. “Build solidarity.” I took that seriously and worked constantly while locked up to build support. My number of followers on Twitter grew from 3,000 to close to 200,000.

The maximum sentence under the law for my supposed misdemeanor charge of contempt of court was 180 days in prison. Yet I was held for 813 days at home with this ankle bracelet to track my every movement 24 hours per day before my prison sentence even began. When I complained, Judge Preska claimed in Orwellian fashion that my home detention was actually “freedom with conditions.”

This was taken minutes after I was released from Danbury prison on December 9 with my sister Susan Sherman after 45 days of incarceration. I had no idea I was going home until a guard told me the day before that due to the danger of COVID I was being released to serve the rest of my 6-month sentence at home — with the ankle bracelet back on.

It was April 25 of the next year — 2022 — that I finally got my final release papers from the Bureau of Prisons. I’m standing in front of a privately-managed halfway house in the Bronx that was responsible for supervising my home detention after my release from Danbury. This photo was taken minutes after my ankle bracelet was cut off for good, on Day 993 of detention. Even without the ankle bracelet, I was not fully free.

My freedom rally on the day I was released after 993 days of detention. The police closed off the street below our apartment so we could celebrate with so many whose solidarity saw us through. That’s my friend Giada Lubomirski speaking; Laura is to my right, labor leader Chris Smalls and actor Susan Sarandon are behind me.

With rock music icon and human rights advocate Roger Waters on the day of my sentencing. Roger has been a huge support to me, my family and the Ecuadorian communities fighting Chevron. Love this man.

At a Roger Waters concert in New York City in late August 2022, four months after the end of my detention.