Is it Possible to be Responsible but Not Guilty for 43 Deaths?
The Morandi Bridge after the collapse that occurred on August 14, 2018. Photo: Michele Ferraris, Wikimedia. Public Domain.
On August 14, 2018, the Morandi Bridge in Genoa, Italy, collapsed, killing 43 people and injuring 16 others. Pictures of the shattered bridge, including a truck left hanging on the edge of the broken span, made headlines around the world. Who was responsible for the disaster? On July 16, 2026, after nearly eight years of investigations and proceedings, a Genoa court convicted 32 defendants. The former chief executive of Italy’s largest motorway operator Autostrade per l’Italia, Giovanni Castellucci, was sentenced to 12 years in prison. Castellucci said that he felt responsible for the disaster, yet insisted he was not guilty: “Mi sento responsabile, ma non colpevole” (“I feel responsible, but not guilty”).
At first glance, Castellucci’s statement sounds absurd. If you are responsible for 43 deaths, how can you not be guilty? In essence, he was saying: “I accept that, as the leader of the organization, I bear responsibility for what happened. However, I deny that I personally committed the criminal negligence necessary for legal guilt.”
Castellucci accepted responsibility as the company’s chief executive. Harry Truman famously kept a sign on the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office that read, “The Buck Stops Here.” Castellucci seemed to express a similar sentiment. He acknowledged that as chief executive of Autostrade per l’Italia, which manages roughly 3,000 kilometers of Italy’s highway network, he should have known about structural problems affecting the bridge. He accepted that responsibility, but not guilt.
Responsibility is not the same as legal guilt. Who was guilty for the bridge’s collapse and 43 deaths? In an investigation of the causes of the disaster, the New York Times reported in 2018 that “a structural engineering professor at the Politecnico di Milano, Carmelo Gentile, found troubling signs of corrosion and possible structural deterioration during tests conducted the October before the bridge collapsed.” Despite Gentile’s warnings, his recommendations were never followed up. “Probably they underestimated the importance of the information,” Gentile said in an interview.
The problem, it seemed, was that the findings were never thought of as being urgent. And, as in all large bureaucracies, Autostrade blamed another organization, the Ministry of Infrastructure, for months of delays in authorizing the work. The urgency was lost in the bureaucracy.
The 32 court convictions showed that the disaster could not be attributed to a single act or a single person. It was the result of years of systemic failures spread across several organizations in the bureaucracy. Senior executives, maintenance managers, engineers and consultants responsible for inspections were all found criminally negligent.
Different defendants received different sentences depending on their roles and degree of accountability. The former numbers two and three of Autostrade were sentenced to 5½ years and 11 years in prison. Of the other defendants, 31 were found guilty of negligence, manslaughter and other offenses, including falsifying documents. 25 defendants were found not guilty.
But what about Castellucci’s conviction and 12-year sentence? How could the head of a large organization, responsible for 3,000 kilometers of highways, bridges and tunnels across 15 regions of Italy, be held accountable for one bridge’s collapse?
One of the implicit defenses in Castellucci’s position is that a CEO cannot personally inspect or monitor every structure in a large network. No CEO can inspect every bridge, read every engineering report or approve every maintenance decision. Their role, and responsibility, is to build an organization by establishing systems, appointing competent managers, allocating resources, and ensuring that safety procedures are followed.
Can someone be guilty of creating a system rather than committing an act? We have no difficulty convicting someone who kills another person. But what if no one individual committed the fatal act causing the bridge to collapse? What if the “act” was years of decisions about incentives, maintenance, budgets, reporting lines and organizational culture?
The prosecution’s case was essentially that organizational systems failed, and that that failure ultimately implicated the head of the company. A CEO cannot inspect everything. True. But CEOs decide priorities. CEOs create incentive structures. CEOs determine whether safety receives adequate resources. CEOs choose which warnings receive attention. CEOs are responsible for the culture of an organization.
So the question is not whether Castellucci personally inspected the bridge. The question is whether the system he led made it likely that warnings would be ignored. Castellucci received the longest prison sentence of any of the 32 convicted defendants, suggesting that the court regarded ultimate responsibility and legal liability for the organizational failures as reaching the very top of the company.
There was no single act by Castellucci. Prosecutors argued that years of management negligence and deferred maintenance, driven by a desire to protect profits, contributed to the collapse. The judges noted during the process that “Between the inauguration of the bridge in 1967 and the collapse, 50 years later, no minimal maintenance was done to reinforce the cables on pier 9 of the bridge’s support.”
Responsibility inside large organizations is dispersed across hundreds or thousands of decisions, each insignificant on its own but potentially devastating in combination. We tend to individualize responsibility by identifying one person who ultimately bears accountability for the actions of thousands. The tendency to seek out one individual who can be held accountable for the actions of a large organization is a form of methodological individualism that reduces complex phenomena to single, unitary actors. We instinctively look for a single person on whom collective responsibility can ultimately rest.
The Morandi Bridge collapse was not simply a failure because of one person’s fault. The court’s ruling was a test of how modern societies assign responsibility and guilt when thousands of people contribute to a single catastrophic outcome. Systems thinking captures the reality that failures rarely have a single cause or a single person who can bear all the blame.
Systems don’t have intentions. They don’t make decisions or commit crimes in the way legal systems understand them. Law therefore has to locate agency in human beings. Even if a catastrophe emerges from a complex system, courts cannot convict “the system.” They must identify individuals whose decisions, omissions, or authority connect them to the failure.
Castellucci accepted responsibility as the chief executive, but denied guilt for the deaths. The Genoa court accepted his first claim; they rejected the second.
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