Corporate manslaughter

Gloucestershire-based Cotswold Geotechnical Holdings was convicted of corporate manslaughter for the death of 27-year-old Alex Wright in September 2008.  This is the first successful corporate manslaughter prosecution since new legislation in 2008, saw the company being fined £385,000.

Wright was a junior geologist, and was killed investigating soil conditions in a deep trench on a development plot in Stroud as a result of it collapsing in on him. The company was run by a sole director, Peter Eaton, who was on-site immediately prior to the accident. The jury found the company’s system of work in digging trial pits was unnecessarily dangerous and ignored well-recognised industry guidance.

There was no one in the dock during the three-week trial as Mr Eaton was seriously ill with terminal cancer and was unable to stand trial on a manslaughter charge.

The Corporate Manslaughter & Corporate Homicide Act 2007 came into force in 2008. To secure a corporate manslaughter conviction under the old rules governing gross negligence manslaughter, the prosecution had to identify an individual guilty of the offence who could be shown to be the "directing mind" of the organisation. As a result of this many prosecutions had failed in the past.

Under the new Act it is sufficient to establish cumulative failures at senior management level, provided those failures were a ‘substantial’ part of the organisation’s breach of duty.

The level of the fine was a matter for debate as the Sentencing Advisory Council guidelines indicate that, where an organisation is convicted of the offence of corporate manslaughter, the sentence should seldom be less than £500,000 and could be as high as millions of pounds. However the level of fine should also be one that the Company is capable of paying, even if over a number of years. In this case a higher fine would have closed the business down, but a lower one would not have been penalistic enough.

This case provides an excellent reason for businesses to look very carefully at their health and safety practices and, even more importantly, to ensure that they are enforced.




Geoff Kew

Published on 07/03/2011