Barberi et al v Prosecutor

The 2009 L’Aquila earthquake occurred in the region of Abruzzo, in central Italy. The main shock occurred at 3.30am on 6 April 2009 and was rated 5.8 or 5.9 on the Richter magnitude scale and 6.3 on the moment magnitude scale. Its’ epicentre was near the town of L’Aquila, the capital of Abruzzo, which together with surrounding villages suffered the most damage. There had been several thousand foreshocks and aftershocks since December 2008, more than thirty of which had a Richter magnitude greater than 3.5. The earthquake was felt throughout central Italy; 308 people are known to have died.

The seven members of the ‘Major Risks National Committee’, an advisory body of the Italian civil protection system, that met in L’Aquila on 31 March 2009, were sentenced by the L’Aquila Trial Chamber to six years imprisonment for the crimes of manslaughter and multiple culpable injuries, for providing the victims with erroneously reassuring information, thus inducing them to suspend some life-saving habits they had been observing, such as leaving home at any earth tremor above a given threshold. The court argued that these reassurances convinced people to stay at home on the night of 5-6 April 2009, a conduct that caused death or injury as a result of the collapse of their respective homes.

The L’Aquila Court of Appeal overturned the judgment of the Tribunal, acquitting six of the seven defendants and reducing the sentence for the one remaining defendant – who was the only civil protection officer and the highest representative of the National Department of Civil Protection at that time in the area – to a 2-year period of imprisonment.

The Court of Appeal upheld the conviction of the latter due to an interview he released to a local television station. In that interview, before the expert gathering held that day, he gave to citizens – without first verifying its scientific substantiation – inexact information on the non-relevance of the seismic activity in progress, stating that the tremor swarm was part of a phenomenology that was normal from the point of view of seismic phenomena and that there was no danger.

The Court of Appeal maintained such conduct to be negligent, since the accused made his determinations on the seismic activity without being an expert (indeed, having repeatedly declared himself incompetent in the matter) and without waiting to verify, at the expert meeting, the correctness of the concepts that he was about to certify.

The reduction of the sentence was justified since:
a) the degree of fault qualified as minor;
b) the inexistence of the defendant’s capacity to commit a crime;
c) the existence of other contributing causes.