How to Judge Safety Crime: Lessons From the Eternit Asbestos Maxi-Trials

Our plain-English summary of How to Judge Safety Crime: Lessons From the Eternit Asbestos Maxi-Trials, by P. Marichalar (New Solutions, 2019).

The study

• Author: P. Marichalar
• Journal: New Solutions
• Published: 2019;29(2):205-223
• Read it: PubMed · Publisher

In plain English

This article is a sociological and legal analysis, not a medical study. The author studied the Eternit asbestos criminal trials held in Turin and Rome from 2009 to 2014 through interviews, trial documents and court decisions. Two owners of four Italian asbestos-cement plants were charged with omission of safety measures and intentional exposure to an environmental disaster. An estimated 2987 victims were cited, 1800 already deceased. Both were found guilty in 2012 and sentenced to sixteen years. On appeal in 2013 the Swiss defendant received eighteen years; the Belgian defendant had died. In 2014 Italy's supreme court canceled the decision on the basis of the statute of limitations. The author described how prosecutors charged exposure itself, avoiding proof that each illness was caused by it. The author also cited epidemiological evidence that male Casale Monferrato workers were 545 times more likely to die of asbestosis than the general male population of Piedmont. The author concluded that individual corporate responsibility could be determined through historical research, but that Italian criminal law remains ill-equipped to deal with cancer.

We wrote this plain-English summary from the full article with the help of AI, and a second AI model checked each sentence against the article. It is not the authors' wording; the abstract and the article are their own account.

What the study did and found

• Design: Sociological, historical and legal case study of a criminal trial, based on interviews, trial documents and court decisions (not a medical or epidemiological study)
• Who was studied: The Eternit maxi-trials, held in Turin and Rome between 2009 and 2014, against the former managers and owners of four Italian asbestos manufacturing plants. An estimated 2987 victims were cited during the trial, 1800 of them already deceased. Most of the ill were former workers; some were relatives of workers or neighbors of the plants.
• Exposure: Asbestos at Eternit asbestos-cement plants making products such as roof tiles and tubes. Exposure was occupational, through asbestos brought home on work overalls, and through airborne asbestos around the premises. No fiber type is named.
• Main results:
  • The two defendants, Stephan Schmidheiny (Swiss) and Louis de Cartier de Marchienne (Belgian), were charged with omission of safety measures (Article 437) and intentional exposure to an environmental disaster (Article 434).
  • In the first decision, both defendants were found guilty on both counts and sentenced to sixteen years imprisonment each.
  • On appeal (3 June 2013), the Swiss defendant was sentenced to eighteen years imprisonment. The Belgian defendant had died a few weeks before the decision.
  • On 19 November 2014, Italy's supreme court canceled the appeal decision on the basis of the statute of limitations.
  • Prosecutors prosecuted exposure as a crime in itself, so that causation did not have to be proven for each individual victim.
  • The Court of Appeal justified prosecuting exposure by equating it with demonstrating what it called collective causality.
  • Epidemiological studies cited by the author (not carried out in this article) reported the following for male workers at the Casale Monferrato plant, compared with the general male population of Piedmont: 32 times more likely to have died from pleural cancer, 27.3 times from peritoneum cancer, and 2.3 times from lung cancer.
  • The same cited studies reported that these male workers were 545 times more likely to have died from asbestosis than the general male population of Piedmont.
  • The same cited studies reported that female workers at the plant were 2.27 times more likely to have developed ovary cancer than the female reference population.
  • From 1984 to 2005, Schmidheiny employed a Milan-based consulting firm. The author describes the firm's mission, as defined in archives seized in 2005, as containing his responsibility for asbestos exposure.
  • On intention, prosecutors produced documents placing the Belgian defendant at 1968 meetings where Irving Selikoff's research was discussed. They also showed that the Swiss defendant gave a 1976 speech to top managers on the health consequences of asbestos exposure.
  • The author states that a drawback of the exposure-based strategy was that it focused on events from decades earlier, which paved the way for the annulment under the statute of limitations.
• The authors' conclusion: The author concluded that the trials showed individual corporate responsibility could be determined through careful historical research. The author also concluded that the Italian criminal code is still ill-equipped to deal with cancer, and called for new tools to criminalize exposure and damages based solely on statistically established facts.

Topics

Medical terms in this study, explained in our Lexicon: Eternit.

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