Italy scientists guilty of manslaughter

[Don Carlos]

Anyone else seen this shit?

6 Italian scienists have been jailed for not predicting an Earth quake...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-20025626

What a joke; I am genuinely stunned that this has happened.

[U4EA]

Dangerous precedent.

[EtUL]

What's up with Italy and charging for stuff like this? Everytime there is a death or serious injury in motorsport you hear about some Italian prosecutor bringing up charges on riders/mechanics/fuckin everyone. Is it a fringe thing or is it a cultural thing with responsibility or what? I have no idea, wondering if anyone else does.

[seremtan]

wow, this is almost like some kind of medieval mentality on display here, like the village wizard fucked up and now must be burned

[SoM]

those judges should be impaled on a stake IVAN style

[GONNAFISTYA]

lol Italy, etc.

[SoM]

that'd be nice

[Scarface]

you can't spell manslaughter without laughter

[ToxicBug]

you can't spell manslaughter without laughter

LOL

[MKJ]

well I for one am shocked.

[Ryoki]

Wow, that's shockingly retarded, nice one Italy
Surely they can take it up with the Euro courts and get the case dismissed though. Right?

EDIT: oh, after reading up on it it hasn't even gone into regular appeal yet - just a local judge being a moron most likely. Weirdly enough in Italy there's a law that says you don't have to serve jailtime until your first appeal has finished, which is equally ridiculous as convicting people for a natural disaster when you think about it, but at least in this case it means those poor suckers won't have to go to jail just yet. I think it goes appeal, high court appeal, euro court appeal, so there's that.

[Whiskey 7]

well I for one am shocked.

I am in total disbelief

[Ferrao10]

Interesting read in this case is an article from 2009:
Italy puts seismology in the dock

On 31 March 2009, all seven were in L'Aquila at a meeting of the Major Risks Committee, an expert group that advises the Civil Protection Agency on the risks of natural disasters. Frequent tremors had been recorded in the surrounding Abruzzo region, culminating in a magnitude-4.0 earthquake on 30 March. The meeting was convened by the service to ask the scientists whether a major earthquake was on its way.

Immediately after that meeting, De Bernardinis and Barberi, acting president of the committee, held a press conference in L'Aquila, where De Bernardinis told reporters that "the scientific community tells us there is no danger, because there is an ongoing discharge of energy. The situation looks favorable". No other members of the committee were at the press conference....

...The minutes of the 31 March meeting, though, reveal that at no point did any of the scientists say that there was "no danger" of a big quake. "A major earthquake in the area is unlikely but cannot be ruled out," Boschi said....

...Before the indictment, Boschi had criticized the Civil Protection Agency's handling of the 31 March meeting. "Such a meeting", he stated in a letter on 16 September 2009 to Guido Bertolaso, the head of the Civil Protection Agency, "should have lasted hours if the Civil Protection Agency really wanted to consider all the data. Instead it only lasted one hour, and it was not followed by a joint statement but by a press conference about which we were not informed."

Looks like one of the accused is definitely guilty.