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Judge in L’Aquila Earthquake Trial Explains His Verdict by Edwin Cartlidge
Article Tags: Law/Policy
ROME—The L’Aquila judge who last October sentenced seven scientists and engineers to six years in prison each for advice they gave ahead of a deadly 2009 earthquake explained his reasons for the manslaughter convictions on Friday. He said that the seven, at the time members of an official government body called the National Commission for the Forecast and Prevention of Major Risks, had analysed the risk of a major quake in a “superficial, approximate and generic” way and that they were willing participants in a “media operation” to reassure the public.
The seven were brought to trial in September 2011 for advice they gave in a meeting on 31 March 2009, six days before the earthquake, and a day after the latest, and strongest, in an ongoing series of tremors, known as a swarm, to strike the area around L’Aquila. They were accused by the public prosecutor of having caused some of the town’s residents to change their behaviour and led them to stay indoors on the night of the quake instead of seeking shelter outside, as they were used to doing when tremors happened.
Following his conviction of the seven commission members on 22 October, Judge Marco Billi had 90 days to make public his reasoning, and in the event did so with just three days to spare. The 950-page document Billi released, known as the “motivazione”, shows him to have largely accepted the prosecutors’ argument. He explains that the trial was not against science but against seven individuals who failed to carry out their duty as laid down by the law. The scientists were not convicted for failing to predict an earthquake, something Billi says was impossible to do, but for their complete failure to properly analyse, and to explain, the threat posed by the swarm. Billi ruled that this failure led to the deaths of 29 of the 309 people killed in the quake and to the injuries of four others. “The deficient risk analysis was not limited to the omission of a single factor,” he writes, “but to the underestimation of many risk indicators and the correlations between those indicators.”
Source: news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider
2013-01-21 15:31:00
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