Last week, Chevron finally secured judicial retaliation against Steven Donziger, the human rights lawyer who helped secure a historic $9.5 billion judgment against the company ten years earlier over their pollution of the Amazon rainforest in Ecuador. After an unprecedented 787 days in pretrial home detention, Donziger was sentenced last Friday to a maximum six months in prison for contempt of court by Loretta Preska, judge for the Southern District of New York, who said that “only the proverbial two-by-four between the eyes will instill in him any respect for the law.”

Preska’s conduct had been a focal point of the trial ever since she was, against local rules, handpicked to oversee the case by judge Lewis A. Kaplan, the Chevron-invested former tobacco industry lawyer who had blocked the judgement against the company and launched the contempt case. Preska denied Donziger’s request for a jury trial, barred Zoom access to the trial for the public, and consistently ruled against Donziger’s legal team. She refused to hear from Donziger’s lawyers about why he had drawn the contempt charge by not turning over his laptop and phone — namely, to protect attorney-client privilege — and at one point sat and read newspapers while presiding over the proceedings.

Critics pointed to Preska’s seat on the advisory board of the New York chapter of the Federalist Society, the right-wing judicial lobby of which Chevron is a donor. But even before then, Preska’s history of business ties and pro-corporate rulings made her an ideal pick to carry out the company’s reprisal on Kaplan’s behalf.