On March 4, 2014, following a seven-week trial, U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan found Steven Donziger liable for leading a civil racketeering conspiracy in the guise of an Ecuadorean civil litigation against Chevron Corp. In an opinion that spanned nearly 500 pages, Kaplan also found Donziger and his Ecuadorean clients liable for committing multiple civil frauds on the Ecuadorean trial court. Among those were the ghostwriting of a report by court expert Richard Cabrera, and the ghostwriting of the final Ecuadorean judgment itself. Kaplan ordered that any judgment funds the plaintiffs might collect be held in trust for Chevron.
In July, Donziger and the Ecuadorean parties spelled out their challenge to Kaplan’s ruling in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Both were represented by new counsel: Deepak Gupta of Gupta Beck for Donziger and Burt Neuborne of New York University School of Law for the Ecuadorean parties.
