In July 2018, (click here) Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Kilmartin filed a lawsuit in state court against 21 fossil fuel companies, including Chevron Corporation, Exxon Mobil, BP and other major oil producers. The suit advances eight claims against the fossil fuel companies for producing, promoting and marketing of fossil fuel products, while concealing the known hazards of their products. Attorney General Kilmartin alleged that the 21 companies were directly responsible for the release of hundreds of gigatons of carbon dioxide emissions between 1965 and 2015 that have caused harm that Rhode Island has experienced and will continue to experience in the future. The severe harms include substantial sea level rise, more frequent and severe flooding, extreme precipitation events and drought.
That same month, the defendant oil companies filed a notice of removal action to federal court. Attorney General Kilmartin filed a motion to remand the litigation back to Rhode Island state court as federal jurisdiction is not appropriate for Rhode Island’s purely state law-based claims. In June 2019, new Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Nerohna notified the Rhode Island federal district court of a well-reasoned decision in federal district court in Maryland that held that the City of Baltimore’s similar lawsuit against oil companies for climate change impacts belonged in state court.
In July 2019, the federal district court in Rhode Island sided with the Rhode Island attorney general in remanding the litigation back to state court as the attorney general had requested. The court found, citing in part the decision in the City of Baltimore litigation, that there is no federal jurisdiction under the various statutes and doctrines as asserted by the defendant oil companies. The defendant oil companies have appealed the district court’s July 2019 decision to the First Circuit Court of Appeals, while Rhode Island’s lawsuit continues in state court. The defendant oil companies have appealed the district court’s July 2019 decision to the First Circuit Court of Appeals, while Rhode Island’s lawsuit continues in state court. ...
These judges are attempting to turn climate advocacy into a crime by their power leverage over Attorney Steven Donziger. This persecution of a very qualified of environmental and human rights attorney is the basis of their hostile priorities for ANY climate lawsuits.
They need to be impeached for their abuses of power as soon as possible.
The picture above is the damage caused by Cheron. That damage doesn't happen by itself. Chevron is trying to rid itself of the liability that is rightfully theirs. Enough of this. The company has found allies in two judges that are leveraging power to silence others that seek the truth and end the petroleum industry assault against human beings and their only "Common Home."
The abuses of these judges are monsterous and they really do deserve to be impeached. It isn't the judicial system that is the problem, it is the corruption leveraged by abusivce judges.
September 1, 2020
Dozens of legal organizations around the world (click here) representing more than 500,000 lawyers along with over 200 individual lawyers today submitted a judicial complaint documenting a series of shocking violations of the judicial code of conduct by United States Judge Lewis A. Kaplan targeting human rights lawyer Steven Donziger after he helped Indigenous peoples win a historic judgment against Chevron in Ecuador to clean up the pollution caused by decades of oil drilling with no environmental controls.
The complaint was formally filed by the National Lawyers Guild in conjunction with the International Association of Democratic Lawyers (IADL). IADL was founded in Paris in 1946 to fight to uphold the rule of law around the world and has consultative status with UN agencies.
Five pages in length with a 40-page appendix with 15 exhibits, the complaint is to be turned over to the chief judge in the federal appellate court in New York that oversees the trial court where Kaplan sits. The complaint is signed by an unprecedented number of legal organizations from approximately 80 countries collectively representing 500,000 lawyers.
The Chief Judge of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, Robert Katzmann, has a duty to read the complaint and determine whether he will appoint a committee to investigate and issue findings....
December 31, 2020
In a decision described as Kafkaesque (click here) by human rights advocates, a U.S. judge who leads a pro-corporate judicial organization funded by Chevron has refused yet again to release celebrated environmental attorney Steven Donziger from home detention after he helped his Indigenous clients win a historic $9.5 billion pollution judgement against the oil giant.
Judge Loretta Preska today issued a New Year’s Eve order continuing Donziger’s indefinite house arrest in Manhattan for a 17th month even though the longest sentence ever imposed for his misdemeanor contempt charge – which his lawyers consider unsupported by evidence – is three months of home confinement if convicted. Partly because the COVID pandemic has closed the New York courthouse, Donziger has yet to be granted a trial.
In the meantime, Preska has denied Donziger’s release four times even though not a single person in the U.S. charged with a federal misdemeanor has been held for even one day, much less well over a year, according to Donziger’s lawyer Ron Kuby (see here).
“This case is an absolute miscarriage of justice and is Kafkaesque in the extreme,” said Rex Weyler, the co-founder of Greenpeace who has accused Chevron of committing “ecocide” in Ecuador after courts found the company deliberately dumped billions of gallons of oil waste onto Indigenous ancestral lands in the Amazon.
Preska has attracted wide criticism for refusing to recuse herself from the case despite being a leader of the Federalist Society, a pro-corporate society of lawyers and judges to which Chevron is a major donor. She also has denied Mr. Donziger a jury of his peers and allowed a private Chevron law firm -- Seward & Kissel -- to prosecute the lawyer in the name of the U.S. government after the U.S. Attorney’s office refused the case....
17 September 2020
At a time when so many (click here) black Americans, Indigenous peoples, people of colour and white allies are protesting at systemic racism, we’d like to highlight a different story of marginalised people speaking truth to power on behalf of their most basic human rights. It’s the story of how “big oil” is now using Harvey Weinstein-like destroy-the-accuser tactics to try to crush environmental defenders. It is also the story of how we can all help those defenders peacefully fight back.
In 2001, Chevron acquired Texaco, including all of its assets and civil liabilities. One of those liabilities was the “Amazon Chernobyl”, a 1,700-square-mile environmental disaster in Ecuador that Texaco created through a disregard – and an attitude that local Indigenous groups have called racism – for the health of the region’s peoples. Texaco, the sole operator of the fields from 1964 to 1992, eventually admitted that it deliberately discharged 72bn litres of toxic water into the environment, which ended up in the water supply, and gouged 1,000 unlined waste pits out of the jungle floor. According to several Indigenous witnesses, including Humberto Piaguaje, a leader of the Ecuadorean Secoya people, the company actually claimed that the oil wastes were medicinal and “full of vitamins”....
