Earthquake ruling

"If you type the word ‘seismologist’ or ‘earthquake’ into any decent search engine, you will get, as you would expect, a mass of hits on science-based websites. This week, you will also get a good number on legally-focused sites. Almost as much as the scientific community, the legal community is shocked by the jailing of Italian scientists last week, for their failure correctly to predict an earthquake which killed about 300 people. In point of fact, the Italian system allows for two appeals before sentence is implemented, so that ‘jailing’ is some way from being a confirmed reality.

Now, there are, of course, nuances in the differences between legal systems which mean that the UK newspapers’ reporting of the convictions ‘for manslaughter’ is simplistic. What we would understand as manslaughter in England is not a gold-standard of legal definition. It is a peculiarly (though not necessarily uniquely) English legal notion; other countries tend to prefer the notion of culpable homicide. The differences are partly linguistic, partly semantic, and partly substantive.

But actually, those nuances and differences, which might slightly misdirect the casual reader, are not important to the scientific or legal communities in this context. Those communities are not concerned with the definition of a crime; the commentators are not arguing that in England the scientists would have been charged with one offence rather than another. The noise being made is really about the fact that criminal process was invoked against the scientists at all, with some fuzzy references to Galileo’s prosecution by the Vatican in the 17th century thrown in...”

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