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I started to bold sections of this but ended up bolding all of it
The abuses of power enacted in this case are so far-fetched as to be almost unbelievable. Shortly before trial, Chevron dropped any monetary claims it was making, which deprived Donziger and the other defendants of the right to a jury trial. Presiding over the case was New York U.S. District Court Judge Lewis Kaplan, who in the courtroom called Chevron “a company of considerable importance to our economy” and banned Donziger and the other defendants from bringing up Chevron’s pollution in the Amazon during the trial. The oil giant’s main evidence relied on the testimony of a disgraced Ecuadorian judge, Alberto Guerra, who had accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars from Chevron and met with Chevron’s lawyers a whopping 53 times before the trial. (Guerra later admitted he lied in his testimony.) Kaplan found Donziger and other defendants guilty in 2014.

The saga didn’t end there—and somehow got even more twisted. In 2019, Kaplan asked federal prosecutors to bring contempt of court charges against Donziger for refusing to hand over his electronic devices and passports during the trial. (Donziger said giving his electronics to the court would betray private client information.) After public prosecutors declined to press charges, Kaplan pulled the unprecedented move of assigning a team of private prosecutors to prosecute Donziger—the first time this had happened in U.S. judicial history. The team Kaplan chose was led by an attorney who at the time worked for a law firm with a history of representing Chevron. Kaplan again went against usual procedure for these cases and also handpicked the judge, Loretta Preska, who has a history of positive rulings in favor of energy companies and serves as an advisor to the Federalist Society, a pro-business group that has benefited from donations from Chevron. Preska put Donziger under house arrest before the trial, claiming he represented a flight risk.

Last July, Preska found Donziger guilty of misdemeanor charges of criminal contempt. In November, the United Nations High Commissioner on Human Rights, the world’s top human rights body, ruled that Donziger’s house arrest was illegal under international law and called on the U.S. to release him. Six international jurists that made up the UN body said in a brief that they were “appalled by uncontested allegations in this case,” adding that Donziger’s criminal charges and arrest “[appear] to be retaliation for his work as a legal representative of indigenous communities.” Despite the UN ruling, Judge Preska sentenced Donziger to six months in prison, the maximum sentence, a day after the UN issued its brief. (Donziger was returned to house arrest in December 2021 under a pandemic early-release program.)