Murder convictions rare for owners or landlords of deadly sites

Like a driver who staggers from a barroom into his car, or someone who drops a lighted match in a tinder-dry forest, a building owner who disregards obvious safety hazards can be held responsible in a criminal prosecution for the lethal consequences.

In such cases, said Robert Weisberg, a Stanford law professor and co-director of the school’s Criminal Justice Center, someone responsible for the property can be convicted of involuntary manslaughter if “a reasonable person under the circumstances would have realized there was some high probability of death.”

What’s more, Weisberg said, “it’s not inconceivable that this could be a murder case,” if there was evidence that a property owner knew of the dangers and deliberately ignored them — like someone with a record of DUI convictions who causes a fatal wreck while driving drunk.

By contrast, after the Deepwater Horizon oil rig blowout in the Gulf of Mexico that killed 11 workers in 2010, U.S. prosecutors obtained a manslaughter guilty plea and a $4 billion fine from a BP subsidiary, but charged only five low-level employees with crimes and secured three misdemeanor guilty pleas.

The 2010 San Bruno gas pipeline explosion that killed eight people brought federal charges against Pacific Gas and Electric Co. — but no individuals — and resulted in six felony convictions for safety violations with a maximum total fine of $3 million.

An Illinois jury in 1985 found three managers of Film Recovery Systems Inc. guilty of murdering a worker who died from inhaling fumes of cyanide used for silver extraction, after the company removed labels that warned of the poisonous chemical.

A nightclub owner and the tour manager of a band were sentenced to four years in prison for involuntary manslaughter for the deaths of 100 people in a club in Rhode Island in a 2003 blaze that was started by fireworks the manager set off as part of the show.

“Because we have such advanced regulatory codes, people (on juries) think of this as a regulatory crime” and are often reluctant to convict building owners of criminal homicide, said Weisberg, the Stanford law professor.

[...] a verdict is also possible in California, where owners who violate building codes can be let off with fines, while manslaughter and murder convictions require proof that the violations or other wrongdoing caused the deaths.

Survivors of the victims of this weekend’s Ghost Ship fire can also file damage suits against the building’s owner, his chief tenant who leased the spaces, and possibly the promoter of the concert that brought people to the warehouse Friday night, said UC Berkeley Law Professor Mark Gergen.