The earthquake in L'Aquila: A reason to tremble THE earthquake that destroyed L'Aquila, a city in central Italy, on April 6th 2009 killed 309 people at the time. But it took until October 22nd of this year for it to claim its latest casualties. Those casualties were seven men convicted on that day of manslaughter, for misleading L'Aquila's inhabitants about the risks they faced. Each was sentenced to six years in prison, though that may be reduced on appeal. The seven - three seismologists, two engineers, a volcanologist and a public official - had taken part in a meeting of the National Commission for the Forecast and Prevention of Major Risks, a government agency, on March 31st 2009. The meeting's job was to assess the risk posed by a series of tremors which had been rocking the city for the previous three months. Public comments made before, during and after the meeting, according to the prosecution, encouraged some townsfolk to stay at home on the fatal night when they might otherwise have left the city - or at least slept outdoors, as has been traditional practice in the area when an earthquake is felt to be imminent - and thus saved themselves. Fabio Picuti, one of L'Aquila's public prosecutors, accused the defendants of having made a series of "banal and self-contradictory" statements, some of which were "misleading." He argued that even though the earthquake was not predictable, evidence available to the seven at the time of the meeting showed that the threat of a big quake in the near future was real. That evidence included the gradually increasing frequency and strength of the tremors shaking the city and the fact that L'Aquila had been devastated by earthquakes in 1349, 1461 and 1703. But, he said, the picture that emerged from the meeting was the opposite. The experts described the tremors as "normal," and if anything positive, because they discharged energy from the fault, and they said it was very unlikely there would be stronger tremors than those already experienced. It was these messages that persuaded some of the victims to stay indoors, according to the testimony of relatives and friends. According to a 500-page indictment the experts acted as "a chorus without soloists, an organism that speaks with a single voice." In fact, most of the controversial public statements appear to have been made by just one of them, Bernardo De Bernardinis, who was at the time deputy head of Italy's Civil Protection Department, and who urged L'Aquila's citizens, on the prompting of a journalist who interviewed him before the meeting, to relax with a good glass of Montepulciano wine. Mr Picuti nevertheless argued that allegedly reassuring statements were also made during the meeting itself and that Dr De Bernardinis's words to the journalist were simply the "manifesto" of the meeting. The judge's decision was complicated by a recording, made public in January, of a phone call between Guido Bertolaso, then head of the Civil Protection Department, and Daniela Stati, who was at the time a local councillor responsible for civil protection, that took place on the eve of the commission's meeting. In it, Mr Bertolaso told Ms Stati that he was setting up the meeting because "we want to reassure the public" and that he wanted to "shut up any imbecile," which was presumably a reference to Gioacchino Giuliani, a laboratory technician who had created panic in Sulmona, a town 50km (30 miles) away, the day before by reportedly predicting that the place would be struck by a big earthquake - a prophecy that turned out to be wrong. There is no suggestion in any of this that the defendants are being punished for failing to predict the quake. Such a prediction would have been impossible, for no such science exists. The accusation is that they were slapdash in their analysis (in particular, the small tremors would normally be regarded as shifting the odds towards expecting a quake, not away from it) and cavalier about publicising their conclusions - which should have been that the risk of a quake had, indeed, risen - and that people died as a result. The analogy, perhaps, would be with a doctor who ignored orthodox remedies, with fatal results. Nonetheless, even those who think the accused were negligent may object to the severity of their punishment. The threat of jail may inhibit public discussion of scientific risks, or prompt scientists to err too much on the side of caution. The real last casualty of L'Aquila's earthquake could be free speech.