WASHINGTON, D.C. — President Joe Biden has been in the giving spirit. In the past month, he went out of his way and against his word by pardoning his son Hunter, followed by an announcement that he would be pardoning a list of 39 others, and granting clemency to nearly 1,500 people.

But lawyer Steven Donziger wasn’t on that list.

U.S. Rep. Jim McGovern has for a while championed Donziger’s cause, and he’s now spearheaded a letter to the president signed by 34 members of Congress. The letter was forwarded to the Oval Office on Dec. 11 seeking a pardon for the lawyer, who was imprisoned on a misdemeanor charge of contempt of court after representing 30,000 Ecuadorian farmers impacted by environmental damages.

In the case that would gain him notoriety but land him in jail, Donziger represented those Ecuadorian plaintiffs, who were suing Texaco (later Chevron after it purchased Texaco in 2000), for the company’s role in dumping 16 billion gallons of toxic oil waste into the Ecuadorian Amazon over the course of almost 30 years, from 1964 to 1992. A $9.5 billion judgment, the largest of its kind, was levied against Chevron in 2011 as a result — a decision that was separately upheld by Ecuador’s Supreme Court in 2013, and the Canadian Supreme Court in 2015 for the purposes of enforcement.

On a 2008 trip to Ecuador, McGovern witnessed the destruction firsthand, and he describes the impacted areas as reeking of petroleum products, and noting that the Indigenous people who have lived there for generations are now subject to high rates of cancer.

“It was horrific,” McGovern said on Thursday. “As a U.S. citizen and as a U.S. congressman, I was ashamed a U.S. corporation had left such a horrible mess.”

Instead of Chevron paying the bill for its crimes (it has yet to pay the billions by distributing that money to awarded plaintiffs), it is instead Donziger who has suffered as an outcome of the trial. As McGovern puts it, Chevron would go on to spend “millions and millions to prosecute Donziger, but not a cent was put back into Ecuador.”

Donziger was placed on house arrest in August 2019 leading up to his own trial on charges of contempt of court for not surrendering his computer and confidential case files to the company. Two federal appeals courts have upheld his sentencing and the Supreme Court declined to hear further appeals, which led to him serving 45 days in prison and 993 days under house arrest in total, which is four times longer than the maximum sentence allowed on the underlying misdemeanor charges.

He was released on Aug. 25, 2022, and at the urging of Chevron and without a fact hearing, Donziger has lost his license to practice law, according to the congressional letter.

McGovern calls this a “miscarriage of justice,” adding that this was an “example of big corporations basically using connections and money against someone who should be praised for what they did.” He also said this represents a dangerous precedent for lawyers, environmental advocates, and human rights activists, as the persecution of Donziger shows that corporate powers have the power to weaponize the U.S. judicial system, and that a pardon would reverse this precedent.

A pardon from the president also would be another endorsement of Donziger’s cause, which has received outspoken, public support from 64 Nobel Prize laureates, Amnesty International, and members of the European Parliament. In September 2021 the United Nations Human Rights Council deemed Donziger’s pretrial detention unlawful by human rights standards, and three federal judges have deemed his arrest unconstitutional, according to the letter.

The letter addressed to Biden and signed by McGovern and 33 other members of Congress also states that, “Mr. Donziger is the only lawyer in U.S. history to be subject to any period of detention on a misdemeanor contempt of court charge. We believe that the legal case against Mr. Donziger, as well as the excessively harsh nature of the punishment against him, are directly tied to his prior work against Chevron. We do not make this accusation lightly or without evidentiary support.”

It goes on to say that the lawyer’s pardon would “send a powerful message to the world that billion-dollar corporations cannot act with impunity against lawyers and their clients who defend the public interest.”

Samuel Gelinas can be reached at sgelinas@gazettenet.com.