Why I Asked the US Supreme Court to Void My Contempt "Conviction"

My case is really about our freedom to hold the powerful accountable and to stop dangerous SLAPP harassment lawsuits.

My petition to the US Supreme Court to review my private prosecution by Chevron is really about the freedom of us all to hold the powerful accountable. It is also about fighting back against corporate-funded SLAPP harassment lawsuits that try to cheat our legal system by intimidating activists into abandoning their work as Frontline Defenders of the Earth.

To be clear, no country that purports to adhere to the rule of law can allow corporate prosecutions like the one that targeted me and kept me detained for almost 3 years in my home and prison after I helped Indigenous peoples and farmer communities win a large pollution judgment against Chevron in Ecuador. The misdemeanor contempt case filed against me in New York by Judge Lewis Kaplan not only was baseless from the start, but it was rejected by the federal prosecutor in Manhattan after careful analysis. Kaplan then took the extraordinary and I believe illegal step of appointing a private Chevron law firm (Seward & Kissel) to prosecute me in the name of the US government. That’s where the case went off the rails and became blatantly unconstitutional and corrupt in the eyes of my legal team, several of whom have actually clerked for some of the more conservative justices (including Thomas and Roberts) on the Supreme Court. In the US and any rule of law country, it is the executive branch that prosecutes criminal cases — not judges who appoint corporate law firms to stand in place of the US government, as happened to me. Further, Kaplan had financial ties to Chevron and allowed the company to pay a witness $2 million to present false testimony against me.

I still can't believe a private corporate prosecution in the US retaliating against a successful human rights and environmental lawyer was allowed to happen. I still can’t believe the federal appellate court in New York sat back for years and watched this debacle unfold and did nothing to stop it despite multiple appeals lodged by my lawyers. I’m still furious I spent 993 days in detention at home wearing an ankle bracelet 24/7. Where I missed out on so much of my son’s life. Where I was harassed with “check-in” calls as many as 15 times a day. Where I was constantly awakened in the middle of the night with beeps from battery packs on the ankle claw.

The longest previous sentence ever served by a lawyer for my supposed offense was 90 days of home confinement; I spent over ten times that amount in detention. Five jurists from the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention also determined my detention was illegal and ordered the US government to release me and pay compensation. Attorney General Garland and President Biden both have ignored the request, but our campaign to get them to listen will continue. Garland should do the right thing and not oppose our petition to the Supreme Court. He could also intervene right now, take over the case from the private prosecutor, and have it dismissed as we and thousands of people have asked him to do for the past year.

We need to be damn sure this kind of private prosecution never happens again to anybody regardless of their politics. And we need to be doubly sure the fossil fuel industry is not able to make what happened to me a “normal” feature of our judicial system. Their plan, of course, is to use the same method to attack any activist or lawyer who might be a little too effective in her or his work.

To be clear, the brief to the Supreme Court deals with a highly technical issue that involves a violation of the Appointments Clause of the US Constitution. But it’s really about a private Chevron prosecutor (Rita Glavin) and her blatant and I believe corrupt conflicts of interest. I find it hard to believe the contamination of Ecuador’s Amazon by Chevron that harms tens of thousands of Indigenous persons and farmers is now being played out through an obscure legal provision of the US Constitution.

While many of us have profound disagreements with some of the justices on the current US Supreme Court, my philosophy is simple: battle until the end. The real power is in the fight and we play the long game. The 28 years of this case have imposed a significant amount of moral and financial accountability on Chevron, which has spent an estimated $3 billion on 60 law firms and 2,000 lawyers fighting our team. That’s a real cost and that represents real pain for the company.

That said, my petition for review is not about political preferences. It is about the rule-of-law. I believe that what Chevron and Judge Kaplan did to me and my family is so offensive to any notion of fairness that we have a realistic chance of prevailing even before a court that has little sympathy for environmental justice.