Big Oil is stil the big dog

By JOEL CONNELLY
SEATTLEPI.COM STAFF

Ask Peter Maas about Exxon's 15-year legal fight not to pay punitive damages for trashing Alaska's pristine Prince William Sound, and the author of "Crude World" takes you back 100 years to a story about the founder of Standard Oil.

John D. Rockefeller was on the golf course when told that a judge had fined his Indiana subsidiary $29 million. "The judge will be dead before we pay a penny of this," Rockefeller calmly replied, and returned to his game.

A federal court jury hit Exxon with a $5 billion punitive damages award over the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill. But the case spent a decade-and-a-half bouncing around federal courts on appeal. The award was cut in half, and the U.S. Supreme Court eventually sliced it to $500 million.

No matter that an estimated 20 percent of the Alaska fishers and villagers and natives who were plaintiffs had died. No amusement that one appellate judge who heard the case, Russell Wiggins, was indeed deceased.

http://www.seattlepi.com/connelly/411118_joel14.html

Exxon is trying to get out of a legitimate judgement.

Chevron already settled with Ecuador.