MANHATTAN (CN) - Ecuadoreans hoping to overturn a decision declaring their $9.5 billion environmental verdict against Chevron fraudulent argued that U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia would have endorsed how the oil giant's litigation was handled there, in a surprising 2nd Circuit brief.
"This litigation has lost its way," the 86-page brief by New York University law school professor Burt Neuborne opens.
Two of Neuborne's clients, Hugo Camacho and Javier Piaguaje, were part of an environmental class action lawsuit filed in 1993 on behalf of more than 30,000 residents of the Ecuadorean rainforest against Chevron's predecessor Texaco, which drilled in the jungle for decades.
Chevron had the case moved from New York where it was filed to Ecuador's rainforest city of Lago Agrio after acquiring Texaco in 2001. It was the trial court there that found the company liable for billions in damages 10 years later.
Shortly before that Ecuadorean verdict, Chevron "skillfully diverted" the issue of the litigation from their "legal duty to remediate the ravaged land, to a distasteful sideshow featuring unremitting assaults on the integrity of Steven Donziger, a lawyer for the Ecuadorian victims," Neuborne wrote.
Chevron returned to New York to accuse Donziger of leading a racketeering enterprise to extort the company.
Summarizing those claims, Chevron spokesman Justin Higgs wrote in a statement: "Donziger, his Ecuadorean legal team and other associates fabricated environmental evidence, pressured scientific experts to falsify reports, plotted to intimidate judges into handing down favorable rulings, bribed court-appointed experts, ghostwrote court reports and even drafted the final judgment."
U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan endorsed these allegations in a March ruling that found the Lago Agrio judgment had been "procured by corrupt means."
Donziger and his former Ecuadorean clients are appealing that ruling separately. They filed their briefs with the 2nd Circuit Wednesday and Tuesday respectively.
The Ecuadoreans announced that they would not let Kaplan's decision stand in the way of their attempts to collect the judgment in Canada, Brazil and Argentina.
Chevron vowed to use Kaplan's factual findings to convince courts in those countries to disregard the ruling.
Donziger, who is now represented by Washington-based lawyer Deepak Gupta, disputed those findings at length in his 120-page brief.
As expected, the brief take particular aim at Chevron's key witness, Ecuadorean Judge Alberto Guerra, who testified that he secretly wrote the original judgment against the oil giant in return for a cut of the award.
Guerra admitted that Chevron promised him more than $300,000, plus a car, a move to the United States, and the services of an immigration lawyer for him and his family, the brief notes.
Justifying such expenditures as Chevron's "private witness protection program" for Guerra, Kaplan wrote that "there are no saints" in the litigation.
Kaplan nevertheless "accepted as true virtually everything that Guerra said," Neuborne wrote in his brief.
Both briefs argue meanwhile that, even if Chevron's claims were true, the Lago Agrio court's award remains "untainted" because two rounds of Ecuador's appellate courts have affirmed it.
Under Ecuadorean law, an intermediate appeals court must review a trial court's judgment "de novo," a standard that would give it a complete re-examination of the evidence, the lawyers said.