JCC Italian seismologists sentenced to six years for failing to predict an earthquake

That's right, the trial that we've been hearing about has ended, and they've been found guilty of manslaughter. Sentence: 6 years.

In the closing statement, the prosecution quoted one of its witnesses, whose father died in the earthquake.
It described how Guido Fioravanti had called his mother at about 11pm on the night of the earthquake - straight after the first tremor.
"I remember the fear in her voice. On other occasions they would have fled but that night, with my father, they told themselves what the risk commission had said. And they stayed."

What on Earth does this have to do with the case? Such a blatant appeal to emotion.

Seismology is not always accurate and to prosecute (also persecute) scientists in Italy because their data didn't accurately show the future is ridiculous. Also impractical, as I predict an exodus of seismologists from Italy, therefore making the earthquake science there not progress.

 

This is stupid.

 

Disgusting. I hope there's some sort of international backlash against the Italian justice system for this.

 

Aren't there more than six seismologists in all of Italy who could've come up with earthquake predictions? Why would these six be particularly responsible?

 

They should have sentenced God to six years - he caused the earthquake to begin with.

Duh.

 

I may be splitting hairs here, but as I understand it the problem was not that they failed to predict the quake, but that when people began to suspect a quake was going to occur the scientists gave reassurances that a quake would not happen. So people who would have left their homes for safety decided to trust the officials and stay put. But I may be misunderstanding the news report.

Not that I think the sentence is fair in any way, just that the title of the thread is a little misleading.

 

Michael Fish has gone into hiding.

 

So this is more evidence that the Italian legal system sucks?

 

Yeah, but how do you arrest God, and how do you keep him in prison?

 

God is omnipresent. He's already in prison!

 

It's not that you misunderstand the news report, you misunderstand how seismology is done. Seismologists predict when the next earthquake will happen at a particular fault. This is a very inexact science. What these seismologists did was interpret from their data that the likelihood of a large earthquake happening in time x was negligible. Layman interpret this as 'downplaying,' however from a scientist's point of view it's simply following the data. In this case, the data led to a conclusion that there wasn't going to be a large earthquake soon. However, there was one. They're being punished for that, so I stand by my title.

 

Ridiculous. We used to have a joke at Caltech that the only way to predict an earthquake in California was to see when the entire seismology staff was on the East Coast for a conference.

 

WTF? That's completely outrageous.

 

In other news, an Italian doctor has been sent to jail for manslaughter after telling a man with cancer that he had 6 months to live, even though that man was killed in a car accident less than 2 weeks later.

 

This crap is ridiculous..

 

I'm half afraid that this is what's coming if Romneybot is elected President and the GOP fully takes back Congress.

 

Given the statistics of criminals who have "found God" in prison, I'd say you're spot on.

 

Simply put....Romney is far more centrist than he pretends. You would have been more likely to see such action under the Bush admin.

 

I don't see how this is a Romney thing. At all. I mean, there hasn't been a response to help the scientists from the president of Italy, and he's from a left-wing political party.

 

Your right, Romney himself might not take such an action.

A Tea Party lead Congress on the other hand....

 

Nah, more like Steve Harper's Canada.

 

Let's go burn down the observatory so this will never happen again!

 

It will go to appeal, like every other Italian case... ever.