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Attorneys for Donziger and the other defendants in Chevron's RICO case will have an opportunity to try to rehabilitate Zambrano today. Donziger spokesperson Chris Gowen issued a statement Tuesday evening that attacked the impartiality of U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan and claimed that Chevron's lead lawyer Randy Mastro, of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, "repeatedly conducted improper impeachments of the witness relying on poor translation and semantics and never once allowing the witness the opportunity to explain his testimony -- a basic component of proper impeachment."
Early in his examination Mastro sprang upon Zambrano a pop quiz on the ruling he claims to have written -- a daring gambit that seemed to pay off. Mastro asked Zambrano, for instance, to name what the author of the ruling had described as "the most powerful carcinogenic agent considered in this decision."
"I don't recall exactly," Zambrano responded. "But if you give me the names, perhaps I can remember."
Mastro then asked Zambrano to identify what the author of the opinion had called "the statistical data of the highest importance to delivering this ruling."
Zambrano hazarded a guess, but was mistaken.
"What theory of causation," Mastro asked next, "does the author of the ruling say he agrees with?"
"I don't recall," Zambrano said.
Mastro may have been emboldened to subject Zambrano to this test by the fact that -- as he revealed next -- Zambrano had been, during his deposition last Friday and Saturday, unable even to identify exactly what the initials "TPH" stood for in the ruling. "It pertains to hydrocarbons," Zambrano had answered, "but I don't remember exactly." As, it seemed, almost everyone in the courtroom except Zambrano knew, the initials stood for "total petroleum hydrocarbons," the main measure of contamination referred to throughout the 188-page, single-spaced ruling.
Worse was yet to come. After establishing that Zambrano claimed to have done all his own research, Mastro asked the former judge, who acknowledged speaking no English or French, how he came to cite as precedents in it English- and French-language rulings from U.S., English, Australian, and French court decisions. Zambrano said that the 18-year-old woman who typed his dictations into the official court-supplied computer had also looked up "topics" for him on the Internet, and had then used Internet translation engines to convert the materials she found into Spanish. Zambrano also said that all the research he collected in this fashion, as well as all the notes he ever took on the Lago Agrio case itself, he had later destroyed, so that there was no surviving documentary corroboration for his having authored the ruling.
