The first ever case under the Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act 2007 is now expected to begin in February 2010, after defence counsel asked for more time before entering pleas.
Cotswold Geotechnical Holdings is charged with the new offence of corporate manslaughter. It faces an unlimited fine and could be made to publicise any wrongdoing in the national press. Company director Peter Eaton, who is charged with gross negligence manslaughter under the common law, faces a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.
The landmark charges relate to the death of an employee in September 2008. A geologist was fatally crushed beneath several tonnes of mud when the sides of a pit in which he had been collecting soil samples collapsed.
The old common law made it very difficult to prosecute companies because a doctrine of identification required the prosecution to pin all the blame on at least one director whose will was identified as the "mind" of the company. As companies commonly distribute responsibility for safety matters amongst senior managers, pinning all the blame on one person was difficult. Various directors would typically claim to know only a fragment of the lethal danger that materialised and it was not permissible to incriminate the company by aggregating the fragmented faults of several directors.
The new law aims to criminalise corporate killing without the need to find all the blame in one individual. The offence is committed where an organisation owes a duty to take reasonable care for a person’s safety, but the way in which its business has been "managed or organised" amounts to a gross breach of that duty and causes death.
The law says that, for a conviction, a "substantial element" of the gross negligence must come from "senior management." Further, any company attempting to evade the law by not making safety the responsibility of a senior manager will, by virtue of that attempt, be open to legal action.
