The scientists were not convicted for failing to predict an earthquake, something Billi says was impossible to do, but for their complete failure to properly analyze, and to explain, the threat posed by the swarm. Billi ruled that this failure led to the deaths of 29 of the 309 people killed in the quake and to the injuries of four others. “The deficient risk analysis was not limited to the omission of a single factor,” he writes, “but to the underestimation of many risk indicators and the correlations between those indicators.”
Billi supports the prosecutors’ contention that the commission members had made contradictory and historically inaccurate statements regarding the possibility of earthquake precursors, that they had mischaracterized the swarm in L’Aquila, and that they had given the townsfolk the false impression that there was nothing to fear by describing the swarm as “normal” and by incorrectly stating that the swarm discharged energy.
He also says that the commission members failed to discuss a number of specific and relevant studies that they had access to, such as a 1995 paper co-authored by commission member Enzo Boschi, a geophysicist at the University of Bologna, which predicted L’Aquila was certain to be struck by a major earthquake by 2015. Failure to consider these studies, he writes, “is equivalent to the death of knowledge.”
Prosecutors in the case had requested 4-year prison sentences. In going beyond that term, Billi says that “the guilt of the defendants is certainly severe” and adds that their guilt is accentuated by what he describes as the “conscious and uncritical adherence to the will of the head of the civil protection department,” Guido Bertolaso, to carry out what Bertolaso had called a “media operation,” which meant that the experts spoke directly with the public rather than via the civil protection department. Billi says that each of the seven commission members played an important role in the meeting and that they worked together as a collective unit.
Speaking with Italian news agency ANSA following the release of Billi’s reasoning, Boschi, who at the time of the eartquake was president of Italy’s National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV), said that he didn’t “feel in any way guilty.” He added: “Surely the judge does not think that after warning of Italy’s seismic risks for years I would have suddenly said that in L’Aquila there was no risk of an earthquake?”
Bizarna sodba pristranskega sodnika (ki mu je – mimogrede – potres porušil stavbo), ki je sledil argumentom pristranskega tožilca (ki mu je potres bojda pod ruševinami pokopal šefa). Sploh ne dvomim v to, da bo padla na višji instanci, vsekakor pa bi padla na Kasacijskem sodišču, če bi do njega slučajno prišla.
Kot pričakovano je sodba na višji instanci (vsaj za 6 seizmologov – vodji civilne zaščite so namreč le zmanjšali kazen, ampak on tako in tako ni znanstvenik) padla:
http://news.sciencemag.org/earth/2014/11/updated-appeals-court-overturns-manslaughter-convictions-six-earthquake-scientists