Steven Donziger, the lawyer who received a multibillion-dollar case towards Chevron over air pollution within the Ecuadorian Amazon after which confronted unrelenting authorized assaults from the oil firm, has been discovered responsible of felony contempt. The legal professional, who has been on home arrest for 2 years, now faces as much as six months in jail. It’s the newest in an extended David-and-Goliath-fashion saga that has included a few of the grossest conflicts of curiosity ever seen in U.S. courtrooms.

Donziger led a case towards the power big Chevron on behalf of 30,000 Indigenous residents and peasant farmers within the Amazon. The agency’s air pollution, which leached into native soil and consuming water and has been linked to elevated charges of cancer and beginning defects, left a legacy so poisonous that it’s been compared with Chernobyl. (The unique polluter was Texaco, which Chevron purchased in 2000.)

In 2013, he secured a $9.5 billion judgment within the case held in Ecuador—the biggest human rights and environmental court docket judgment in historical past. But the next 12 months, a U.S. court docket dominated that the judgment was unenforceable as a result of it was obtained by fraud and racketeering exercise. The verdict, handed down by U.S. District Court Judge Loretta Preska on Monday, stemmed from the 2014 case. Donziger had been charged with six misdemeanor felony contempt costs, together with refusing to obey court docket orders by turning over over his laptop computer and mobile phone as proof within the racketeering swimsuit. (He has maintained that doing so would violate his authorized purchasers’ privateness.)

In a 245-page ruling, Preska discovered him responsible of all six counts of contempt. No sentencing date has but been set, however he might be compelled to serve six months or pay a advantageous of as much as $5,000.

“It’s time to pay the piper,” Preska wrote within the judgment.

While the end result is horrible information for Donziger, it’s one he was anticipating. “This trial had already been decided and the purpose of the proceeding was to try to glom on a veneer of due process over a decision that I think was made behind closed doors by judges,” he advised me in May.

He famous that the fees towards him have been introduced not by the general public court docket system, however by non-public prosecutors—a primary for the American judiciary. The non-public legal professionals have been led by Rita Glavin, who on the time of her appointment was a accomplice on the legislation agency Seward & Kissel. In April 2020, Seward & Kissel admitted that it had represented Chevron as a consumer as not too long ago as 2018—a significant battle of curiosity that Donziger’s legal professionals had long suspected.

The obvious conflicts don’t cease there, although. Preska, who convicted Donziger and likewise positioned him on home arrest again in 2019, wasn’t randomly assigned to supervise the case as is typical. Instead, she was handpicked for the function by Judge Lewis Kaplan, who presided over a 2012 RICO case towards Donziger in an unprecedented and extremely shady course of. Preska serves as an advisor to the pro-business Federalist Society, to which Chevron has donated massive sums.

“Preska’s decision is the result of a patently unfair trial process that she and Judge Kaplan structured to undermine my defense and to make me appear guilty,” Donziger wrote in a statement.

Donziger’s authorized staff plans to contest the choice and imagine the court docket’s apparent biases may assist them to handily win their enchantment.

“We have a strong appeal and I look forward to the opportunity to brief the appellate court on this obvious travesty of justice,” Donziger wrote. “I also repeat my call for Judge Preska to release me immediately so I can return to my human rights work and help those in Ecuador who are suffering and dying because of Chevron’s dumping of billions of gallons of cancer-causing toxic waste into the Amazon.”