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Re:Fern Hollow Bridge should have been closed years before i... by naasking on Wednesday June 19, 2024 @08:55AM (#40727843)
No, they were jailed because they reassured the population that there was no risk of earthquake, when there absolutely was. That's very different.
Re:Fern Hollow Bridge should have been closed years before i... by DangitBobby on Wednesday June 19, 2024 @11:21AM (#40729122)
Still ridiculous, though. Do doctors in Italy go to jail for giving false negative cancer diagnoses? Can I sue the weather man when I get struck by lightning when they said there's no chance of rain? Maybe next time the public should interpret the seismographs themselves.

Edit: It was eventually overturned [1]. Still, a shocking indictment of the court system.

1. https://www.theverge.com/2014/11/11/7193391/italy-judges-cle...

Re:Fern Hollow Bridge should have been closed years before i... by naasking on Wednesday June 19, 2024 @03:13PM (#40731471)
> Still ridiculous, though. Do doctors in Italy go to jail for giving false negative cancer diagnoses?

If there were strong indications of cancer and a doctor blatantly ignored it? An argument could be made that's negligence causing death.

Clearly some degree of negligence is absolutely criminal when people's lives are on the line. Maybe you don't agree where that line was drawn in this specific case, but that's not an argument that no such line exists.

Re:Fern Hollow Bridge should have been closed years before i... by DangitBobby on Friday June 21, 2024 @10:42AM (#40750149)
Negligence means everything would have been fine if everyone involved did their duty. So I gave cases where people did their duty, got it wrong, and weren't negligent. You can imagine scenarios where they were negligent because they didn't do their duties, but I can assure you they were not since these were my imagined scenarios. In the case of these scientists who did their duty to the best of their abilities, this wasn't negligence, full stop.