#Judicial consent amazon trial

It works like this: first, Chevron successfully moved the case out of U.S. **Chevron's jurisdictional shell game makes a mockery of the rule of law: Chevron is playing a jurisdictional shell game to block resolution of the case. One California court ordered Chevron to pay a fine to Cristobal Bonifaz, a human rights lawyer who formerly represented the Ecuadorian communities, after the company's harassing lawsuit against him - led by outside counsel Scott Edelman - was found to have violated the First Amendment. As reported in The Atlantic, Chevron was even caught trying to enlist an American reporter, Mary Cudahee, to engage in corporate espionage against our team in exchange for $20,000. Hewitt Pate has sued or threatened to sue the lawyers for the affected communities, their financial supporters and even environmental groups that support them. As part of its attack campaign, Chevron General Counsel R. ** Chevron has tried to harass and intimidate those who stand with the Ecuadorian communities in their struggle for justice: Chevron recently tried to cyberbully a respected legal reporter who disclosed forensic evidence suggesting the company's star witness had lied in U.S court in the company's retaliatory 'racketeering' case. (For background on some of Chevron's attempts to corrupt Ecuador's courts, see this sworn affidavit from Ecuadorian lawyer Juan Pablo Saenz.)

Chevron also tried to use Borja to entrap the trial judge in a fake bribery scandal. A Chevron operative in Ecuador, Diego Borja, boasted on tape that he switched out dirty soil samples for clean ones before presenting them to the court. Company lawyers inundated the court with frivolous and duplicative motions - one time filing 39 in less than an hour - to paralyze the proceedings. During the Ecuador trial, Chevron's legal team threatened the judge with jail time if he did not rule in the company's favor. Recently, Chevron's claim that the judgment was written by lawyers for the plaintiffs unraveled when a forensic analysis of the trial judge's computers showed he wrote the judgment painstakingly over a period of four months, saving it almost 500 times prior to its issue. The secret videos also show that Chevron engaged in pre-inspections of well sites to construct a ruse to hide its contamination from the court during the later official judicial inspections. ** Given the overwhelming evidence against it, Chevron tried repeatedly to corrupt and sabotage Ecuador's courts: Internal Chevron whistleblower videos recently disclosed by Vice News and Amazon Watch show the oil major's technicians finding massive amounts of soil contamination at well sites that the company had previously confirmed as 'remediated' to Ecuador's government. (For more detail about the extensive evidence against Chevron, see here.) Cancer rates in the area have predictably skyrocketed. The system worked as planned: former Chevron executive Rodrigo Perez Pallares openly admitted during the trial that the company contaminated surface waters with at least 15 billion gallons of toxic oil sludge. The court decision relied largely on Chevron's own technical reports and environmental audits to meticulously document extensive and even life-threatening levels of oil contamination at hundreds of the company's former well sites and in rivers and streams relied on by local residents for drinking, bathing and fishing.

After an eight-year trial that included 105 technical evidentiary reports, Chevron was found guilty in 2011 of dumping billions of gallons of oil waste into the rainforest when it operated in Ecuador from 1964 to 1992. ** Ecuador's Supreme Court unanimously affirmed the decision against Chevron based on the company's own scientific evidence.

#Judicial consent amazon trial