Ex-TEPCO Officials To Be Indicted Over Fukushima

AmiMoJo writes: Three former executives of Tokyo Electric Power Company will face mandatory indictment over the March 2011 nuclear accident at the Fukushima Daiichi plant. The prosecution inquest panel of randomly-selected citizens voted for the indictment on Friday, for professional negligence resulting in death and injury. "Tokyo prosecutors in January rejected the panel's judgment that the three should be charged, citing insufficient evidence. But the 11 unidentified citizens on the panel forced the indictment after a second vote, which makes an indictment mandatory. The three are former chairman Tsunehisa Katsumata, 75, and former executives Sakae Muto, 65, and Ichiro Takekuro, 69. Citizens' panels, made up of residents selected by lottery, are a rarely used but high-profile feature of Japan's legal system introduced after World War Two to curb bureaucratic overreach."

Comments

Re:better late than never

[Penguinisto]

You gonna charge them with crating a Tsunami? One that exceeded estimates by Government Officials?

Seems they have Witch Hunts in Japan too...

The idea isn't to charge them with the cause of the disaster, but with more than a little incompetence that they displayed afterwards - not to mention the often blatant lies they told to the public during the aftermath. Examples include publicly chewing out the Daiichi site supervisor for using seawater to keep the surviving reactors cooled down when that was pretty much all he had to use (given the alternative? Yeah, I'd piss on the things if it helped). Other examples include sending needed cooling water to the Daini site... in drinking water bottles. There's a whole host of other bork-ups, and the blame for the vast majority of them lies squarely on the execs in Tokyo.

Besides, I do respect one thing about the Japanese - when the shit hits the fan, the leaders are the first to take blame, and go out of their way to not pass the blame downhill unnecessarily. Up and down the chain, folks take responsibility for what they do (or don't do). Wouldn't hurt to see some of that attitude on this side of the Pacific...