Federal prosecutors are considering whether to pursue manslaughter charges against BP managers for decisions made before the Gulf of Mexico oil well explosion last year that killed 11 workers and caused the biggest offshore spill in U.S. history, according to Bloomberg News.
U.S. investigators also are examining statements made by leaders of the companies involved in the spill — including former BP Chief Executive Officer Tony Hayward — during congressional hearings last year to determine whether their testimony was at odds with what they knew.
Bloomberg’s report relies upon three federal prosecutors who spoke on condition they not be named because they weren’t authorized to discuss the case publicly.
Bloomberg reports that charging individuals would be significant to environmental- safety cases because it might change behavior, said Jane Barrett, a law professor at the University of Maryland.
“They typically don’t prosecute employees of large corporations,” said Barrett, who spent 20 years prosecuting environmental crimes at the federal and state levels. “You’ve got to prosecute the individuals in order to maximize, and not lose, the deterrent effect.”
The Justice Department in June said it opened criminal and civil investigations into the explosion and spill on the Deepwater Horizon rig which began April 20.
Prosecutors have been looking at charges of involuntary manslaughter or seaman’s manslaughter, which carries a more serious penalty of up to 10 years.
The manslaughter investigation is focusing on decisions by BP managers leading up to the explosion that may have sacrificed safety in favor of speed and cost savings, according to one Bloomberg source.
David Uhlmann, a former chief of the Justice Department’s environmental crimes section, said he expected that companies involved in the spill would be charged with seaman’s manslaughter. Making a case against individual managers would be more difficult, he said.
“You have relatively low-level people in these companies responsible for making bad decisions,” said Uhlmann, who now teaches at the University of Michigan Law School in Ann Arbor. “It’s not clear they had adequate training. It’s not clear they all knew what everyone else involved knew.”
