On Monday, an Italian court convicted six scientists and a government official of manslaughter for providing the townspeople of L’Aquila with “inaccurate, incomplete and contradictory” information about risk of a 2009 earthquake in which 309 residents subsequently died. The prosecutors in the case successfully alleged that the scientists, all members of the National Commission for the Forecast and Prevention of Major Risk (La Commissione Nazionale per la Previsione e Prevenzione dei Grandi Rischi), downplayed the risks to the town at a meeting in which they described the possibility of a large earthquake “unlikely” despite a series of minor tremors. Interestingly, the prosecutor in the case cited a 2009 ruling by the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana holding that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ negligent maintenance of a navigation channel contributed to the flooding after Hurricane Katrina.
The defendants were sentenced to six years in prison and ordered to pay $10.2 million in damages and costs, a result one of the convicted defendants, a physicist, has decried as “medieval.”
The decision to criminally punish scientists for failing to predict a natural disaster that is inherently unpredictable is likely to have a chilling effect on critical research. More importantly, it may lead to reluctance on the part of the scientific community to collaborate with government agencies for the public good. Indeed, the Department of Civil Protection (Dipartimento della Protezione Civile), of which the National Commission is a part, suggested that the first consequence of the court’s ruling would be a “paralysis of forecasting and prevention activities” (translation my own). “This is the death of public service on the part of professors and professionals,” said Luciano Maiani, president of the National Commission, who, along with a number of colleagues, resigned his post on Tuesday.
