The cruise ship captain was arrested on Saturday and charged with manslaughter, according to Reuters. Given ongoing international media attention many question whether or not Captain Francesco Schettino has a chance at a fair trial. A front page editorial in Italy’s Corriere della Sera read, “Italy owes the world, international public opinion, the families of those who lost their lives, those who were injured and those who fortunately remained unhurt, a convincing explanation and the toughest possible sanctions against those responsible for this tragedy,” reports Reuters.
“I don’t think he’s going to get a fair trial, frankly,” says Mr. Loh, who contends he doesn’t believe a captain should be brought to criminal trial in a case like this at all. “It’s unfair to criminalize negligent behavior…. I think he can be held responsible, but there’s a difference between criminal and civil responsibility,” he says.
“It’s a question of mens rea," a Latin phrase meaning a guilty mind, says Loh. “Knowing it to be wrong and doing it anyway is the nature of criminal behavior … but is there any evidence the captain knew what he was doing was wrong?"
Mark Sappenfield
Dear Reader,
About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:
“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”
If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.
But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.
The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.
We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”
If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.
