Steven Donziger represented the 30,000 Ecuadorian Indigenous and farmer plaintiffs who won the $9.5 billion Lago Agrio judgment against Chevron in 2011 for decades of catastrophic Amazon oil contamination. Chevron then waged a U.S. counter-litigation campaign — described by Earthjustice and the UN as one of the most aggressive corporate retaliation suits in modern legal history.

After the Southern District of New York U.S. Attorney declined to bring criminal contempt charges, the same SDNY judge (Lewis Kaplan) appointed a private prosecutor — a Chevron-tied firm — to bring the case anyway. Donziger spent 993 days in pretrial home confinement, 45 days in federal prison, and ultimately had his New York bar license revoked. The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention found his detention to be a violation of international law.

We ask the President for a full pardon clearing the conviction.