Time Is Running Out for President Biden To Pardon Me. Please Help Us Push Him.

Only 110 days remain in the President’s term. Mr. Biden must send a clear message: private corporate prosecutions violate the rule of law and must never happen again.

I could use a little help — and so could the rule of law in our country.

Time is running out for President Biden to pardon me after I was detained by Chevron for 993 days in the nation’s first-ever private corporate prosecution. That detention happened from 2019 to 2022 after I helped Amazon communities in Ecuador win a landmark $10 billion pollution case against the company, a historic victory for Indigenous peoples that sent shock waves through the fossil fuel industry.

There’s now a little over three months left in the President’s term. If the pardon is to happen, thousands of people who support me and the Amazon communities must act by signing the petition at FreeDonziger.com and by calling the White House at 202-456-1111. (If you’ve already called, please call again.)

I need this pardon so my full rights and freedoms under the Constitution can be restored; so I can continue with my human rights work by being able to travel and practice law; and so I can continue helping the Amazon communities in Ecuador who are suffering and dying because of Chevron’s repeated refusal to comply with court orders that it remediate its toxic disaster.

In home detention in 2020 with a GPS monitor on my left ankle. I’m the only person ever to be detained prior to trial on a misdemeanor contempt charge.

For those unfamiliar with this extraordinary story, let me explain the basics.

In the 1960s, Texaco (now Chevron) entered Ecuador’s Amazon region to extract oil. It built hundreds of wells and gouged thousands of unlined waste pits out of the jungle floor in the delicate ecosystem. Oil waste from the pits was discharged into rivers and streams that Indigenous communities were using for their drinking water, bathing, and fishing. The company’s pollution — the result of a deliberate engineering design — has today driven several of these communities to the brink of extinction. Thousands have died of cancers and other oil-related diseases, according to health evaluations. I was one of the key lawyers who helped these communities fight back against the company, resulting in the landmark judgement in Ecuador (where Chevron insisted the trial be held and where it had accepted jurisdiction) that was affirmed unanimously by Ecuador’s highest court in 2013.

That legal victory by Indigenous peoples over the oil industry apparently was too much for Chevron to handle. The company immediately vowed to never pay the judgement. It’s top lawyer famously said at the time: “We will fight this until hell freezes over, and then fight it out on the ice.”

To make good on this claim, Chevron hired 60 law firms and 2,000 lawyers to attack me and my colleagues in what is probably the most vicious corporate retaliation campaign ever. When we still refused to surrender, Chevron persuaded a pro-corporate judge in New York to charge me with criminal contempt of court for appealing an order that I give Chevron’s attorneys my computer and confidential case file in the middle of a civil litigation. Such an order violated attorney-client privilege and was unprecedented in the history of our judicial system; it also would have put the lives of my vulnerable clients in danger.

Those contempt charges resulted in me being criminally prosecuted in 2021 by Chevron lawyers in the United States in the first corporate prosecution in our nation’s history. I mean this literally. A federal judge with obvious affection for Chevron appointed a private corporate law firm that had ties to the company to step in to the shoes of the government to prosecute me after the federal prosecutor rejected the judge’s baseless charges. These Chevron lawyers — many of them the same individuals who I had defeated in Ecuador — exercised their power to have me detained for almost three years on a misdemeanor charge with a maximum permissible sentence of six months. I ended serving the most amount of detention for a misdemeanor in U.S. history. For background on this historic miscarriage of justice as applied to a U.S. human rights lawyer, read this excellent article by Erin Brockovich.

Even though my detention ended a little over two years ago, as a result of Chevron’s private prosecution I still cannot travel or practice law. I still cannot have a bank account. I cannot work in my chosen profession. I’m a half-citizen at best with a very uncertain professional future unless the President acts. (I appealed my Chevron-prosecuted criminal contempt case all the way to the Supreme Court, which refused to hear my appeal even though two justices dissented from that decision by declaring the prosecution unconstitutional.)

The President issuing a pardon is absolutely the right thing to do on basic rule of law principles; no country that adheres to the rule of law would ever allow a corporation to step into the shoes of the government and prosecute somebody as happened to me. More broadly, our nation needs this pardon as a way for the President to send an unequivocal message that private corporations will never be allowed to prosecute and detain their critics ever again.

We already have built significant momentum for this pardon. Dozens of Nobel laureates, legal organizations, and civil society organizations like Greenpeace, Amnesty, Amazon Watch, Global Witness and others have contacted the President on my behalf. Those pleas have fallen on deaf ears thus far. The best way to make a difference now is for thousands of people in the U.S. and across the globe to contact the White House directly. This can happen by signing the petition on our campaign website at FreeDonziger.com, and by calling the White House switchboard at 202-456-1111.

If you call the White House, I ask that you raise a little respectful hell.

Specifically, please ask the operator to tell President Biden to pardon me in the interests of justice and the rule of law and also to protect the climate movement — and to ensure nobody ever again gets targeted with a corporate prosecution.

Since 14 prominent lawyers who represent me sent a pardon petition to the President last March (read it here), the support I have received has greatly moved me and my family. In June, 50 prominent civil society groups signed a letter urging the President to pardon me. Three US federal judges, including the two from the Supreme Court, already had ruled my contempt case was patently unconstitutional. Currently, several members of Congress are planning to send a letter similar to one sent in 2022 that President Biden ignored.

Again, please visit the FreeDonziger.com to help. I am deeply grateful for the support. We will continue pushing until the pardon is granted.

-Steven

With my son Matthew just after a federal judge sentenced me in 2021 to six months in prison after already spending over two years in pre-trial home detention. I ended up detained 993 days at home and in prison on a charge where the maximum sentence by law was 180 days.