For anyone not familiar with the situation, a 2009 earthquake in L'Aquila, Italy, caused the deaths of more than 300 people. In the days leading up to the earthquake, tremors in the area appeared to indicate a coming earthquake. One Italian official, on information from the Italian National Commission for the Forecast and Prevention of Major Risks, stated that an earthquake was unlikely. After the quake, the official and six scientists at the Commission were charged with manslaughter on the theory that their "inexact, incomplete and contradictory" statements caused people to stay when they should have fled the area. Last week, the Italian court handed down a verdict of guilty and a potential sentence of 6 years.
Make no mistake about it: This is a bad thing. Seven people who do not deserve imprisonment look likely to get it. (Although, under Italian law, the sentence must be reviewed.) But the English-language press, out of the United States and United Kingdom, has largely missed the point. They have focused on largely on two things: 1) This conviction bends the definition of "manslaughter" and 2) This conviction is an attack on science that will have a chilling effect on how scientists do business.
I am not really convinced that either one is true.
Let's take the first issue, about whether this is really manslaughter. I've seen a fair bit of analysis about this, mostly revolving around whether the scientists were negligent in their predictions. Wired, for example, had this to say:
"If you look up a definition of manslaughter (and it varies from country to country), this likely falls under the criminally negligent variety, where “a defendant intentionally puts himself in a position where he will be unaware of facts which would render him liable.” This suggests that the seven on trial caused the 308 deaths from the l’Aquila earthquake by ignoring the facts presented." (emphasis and link theirs)Wired correctly notes that manslaughter varies between jurisdictions, and then proceeds to quote a common law definition of manslaughter from Wikipedia. I actually find many of Wikipedia's law articles very good, but, since the majority of English-speaking countries have common law based systems (having been English colonies), Wikipedia's articles tend to be heavily influenced by common law views.
I don't know anything about Italian law apart from that, and I don't speak Italian beyond "parli tedesco, per favore", so I won't attempt to analyze the law in any meaningful way. But here is what I found:
Italy is a civil law country in the French tradition. The statute the scientists were convicted of is Title XII, Section 589 of the Penal Code. The section is entitled "Omicidio colposo", which literally translates to "negligent murder" but is generally translated as "manslaughter". The relevant part of the section, directly translated by Google Translate, reads "Whoever causes guilt for the death of a person shall be punished with imprisonment from six months to five years" with no further commentary relevant to these circumstances.
I certainly don't know what that means. I understand what the words mean, but there are doubtless subtleties and complexities of the law that I don't understand. But a lot of the outrage in this case, at least in the English-language press, has focused on whether these scientists are genuinely guilty of the crime they were convicted of. I can honestly say that I don't know, and I have seen absolutely no analysis of the Italian statute or the Italian legal system.
The second theme in the coverage has been that this is a serious assault on science. Commentators are claiming that the Italian prosecutor misunderstood the limitations of seismology and that this will have a chilling effect on scientists in the future.
The chief of the American Academies for the Advancement of Science said that "The basis for indictments brought by the local prosecutor in L’Aquila appears to be that the scientists failed to alert the population of L’Aquila of an impending earthquake." Were that the case, that would certainly fly in the face of what we know about "predictive" sciences. But it's not what happened. The prosecutor stated that the statements of the Commission gave residents a false sense of security, suggesting that the risks were lower than what they actually were. That may sound like splitting hairs, but it's a very important point, because it relies on that very uncertainty that the AAAS chief noted. The scientists were not convicted for failing to predict the earthquake or its severity. Just the opposite, they were convicted for giving the population the impression that they could, when it was scientifically impossible for them to do so. Whether or not they actually did this is another question, but they were convicted on an allegation of claiming certainty when the situation created uncertainty, not the other way around.
None of this is to excuse the verdict that the Italian court reached. I cannot see how they are morally culpable, on a criminal level, for anything that they did. (I will show my colors here as a strict negative retributivist:) Even if everything the prosecutor alleged was true, I cannot see how what amounts to foolishness or professional arrogance is deserving of criminal punishment.
However, I think this narrative is a more fair depiction of what actually happened. We will have to take the prosecutor's and judge's word for it that, if the narrative is as the prosecutor described it, then the scientists were convicted of a real crime. And they were not convicted for a failure to perform magic, or even for getting it grievously wrong. They were convicted of telling people an area was safe when there was no professionally responsible basis for doing so. (Again, I want to reiterate that I don't know if the narrative as alleged is really accurate.)
But I don't think this verdict poses a threat to science in Italy, either. First, science is a resilient phenomenon. These men will hardly be the first scientists convicted by an Italian authority. The human desire to study and understand our world is a strong one, and there will not be a sudden backlash in the scientific community because of a single bad verdict. (In fact, this story has virtually dropped out of the news since Thursday.)
But, second, this case really has very little to do with science. It is not about seismology; rather, it is about expectations management. The message the judge and prosecutor are attempting to send can be summed up as follows: "If you are going to tell people something is safe, you had best be sure. Be transparent about the limitations of your confidence, and don't mislead people by projecting an illusory certainty."
I think every responsible scientist would agree with that idea as an important tenet of scientific ethics. I think every responsible scientists would agree that scientists, whether public or private, should be candid and straightforward about the limitations of their predictions and should be careful not to communicate certainty when certainty is impossible. I think that every responsible scientist would agree that giving uncertain predictions an appearance of certainty is both irresponsible and unethical. It is an uncontroversial ethical standard.
I don't think that a failure to live up to that standard should be punishable by imprisonment, but I also don't think that people's anger at these scientists is unjustified, even if they did what they're alleged to have done. These scientists have been unjustly convicted, but not because they are being held to an unreasonable scientific standard. They are being held to an unreasonable legal and moral standard. Not every breach of ethics, especially professional ethics, is deserving of criminal punishment.
To put it as simply as possible, the Italian prosecutor alleged that six scientists conveyed a false and unjustified certainty about a scientific matter with very real consequences. Even if that is the case, they do not deserve imprisonment. However, if it is true, they probably should not be seismologists.
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