Jackson Mote is a junior French l
anguage major from Indianapolis.
CHRISTA SCHRODEL / THE DEPAUW
Yesterday, an Italian appeals court overruled a 2012 decision that found six geologists and one government employee guilty of manslaughter. In 2009, they were commissioned to investigate several seismic tremors in the Abruzzo region of Italy and days after they began their work, a 6.3 magnitude earthquake struck the town of l’Aquila.
They were charged on the grounds of "inexact, incomplete and contradictory information" after they failed to communicate an impending severe danger to the town’s population. The earthquake in 2009 resulted in at least 309 deaths. These experts and the population of the town knew that it was a high-risk area for earthquakes and that was one of the factors in the appeals court’s decision.
In September of 2013, one of the at-the-time convicted scientists, Enzo Boschi, published letter in Science magazine stating his reasoning against the convictions. At the time of the earthquake, he was the director of Italy’s National Institute for Geophysics and Volcanology and was a member of the Major Risks Commission.
In part of this letter, Boschi states “I have been found guilty despite the illogical charges and accusations that set dangerous precedents for the future of the scientific process”. More than 5,000 scientists signed an open letter to Italian President Giorgio Napolitano following the guilty verdicts. The open letter expressed support for the scientists. After the verdicts were announced, four members of the Major Risks Commission quit in protest and due to the “impossibility” that they could “work in serenity and offer highly scientific analyses to the state in these complex conditions,” according to Luciano Maiani.
I believe that it is good that an Italians appeals court overruled the verdict because if the charges had not been overturned, the relationship between science and legislation would have greatly changed. If scientists could be charged for being wrong in cases such as this, we would either see a great increase in the accuracy of seismologists’ claims or a lack of new seismologists entering the scientific field, due to fear of prosecution.
Is it true that being wrong at science could have been a crime? The concept of making mistakes in science could have been vastly changed within Italy and possibly in other parts of the world, if the accused had remained guilty.
Let’s just be glad that legislation hasn’t challenged scientific mistakes forever. If scientists had been prosecuted for mistakes in the previous centuries, scientists such as Darwin, Fleming and Einstein may have been imprisoned.