Murder convictions rare for owners or landlords of deadly sites

Like a driver who staggers from a barroom into his car, or someone who drops a lighted match in a tinder-dry forest, a building owner who disregards obvious safety hazards can be held responsible in a criminal prosecution for the lethal consequences.

The events leading up to this weekend’s horrific Oakland warehouse fire appear to have been rife with warning signals. Residents jammed into a building that had permits only for industrial use. Exposed electrical wires dangling from a ceiling. Illegal generator hookups after a transformer caught fire. No sprinklers or smoke detectors. Complaints to the city that brought out an inspector, who tried to enter on Nov. 17, failed and never returned.

In such cases, said Robert Weisberg, a Stanford law professor and co-director of the school’s Criminal Justice Center, someone responsible for the property can be convicted of involuntary manslaughter if “a reasonable person under the circumstances would have realized there was some high probability of death.”

An Alameda County Sheriff, center, escorts a woman carrying flowers at the site of a warehouse fire Tuesday, Dec. 6, 2016, in Oakland, Calif. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez) An Alameda County Sheriff, center, escorts a woman carrying flowers at the site of a warehouse fire Tuesday, Dec. 6, 2016, in Oakland, Calif. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez) Photo: Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP Photo: Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP Image 1 of / 73 Caption Close Murder convictions rare for owners or landlords of deadly sites 1 / 73 Back to Gallery

What’s more, Weisberg said, “it’s not inconceivable that this could be a murder case,” if there was evidence that a property owner knew of the dangers and deliberately ignored them — like someone with a record of DUI convictions who causes a fatal wreck while driving drunk.

Alameda County District Attorney Nancy O’Malley said Monday her investigators would be looking into possible criminal charges, including murder and involuntary manslaughter, in the fire at the Ghost Ship warehouse. It is “too early to speculate” on whether anyone will be prosecuted, she told reporters.

Murder prosecutions for industrial tragedies are more common in other countries. In Bangladesh, for example, the owner of a garment factory and 37 other people have been charged with murder, punishable by death, for the April 2013 collapse of the Rana Plaza building that killed 1,135 workers.

By contrast, after the Deepwater Horizon oil rig blowout in the Gulf of Mexico that killed 11 workers in 2010, U.S. prosecutors obtained a manslaughter guilty plea and a $4 billion fine from a BP subsidiary, but charged only five low-level employees with crimes and secured three misdemeanor guilty pleas.

The 2010 San Bruno gas pipeline explosion that killed eight people brought federal charges against Pacific Gas and Electric Co. — but no individuals — and resulted in six felony convictions for safety violations with a maximum total fine of $3 million.

At least one U.S. jury has convicted company officials of murder for dangerous conditions on their property. An Illinois jury in 1985 found three managers of Film Recovery Systems Inc. guilty of murdering a worker who died from inhaling fumes of cyanide used for silver extraction, after the company removed labels that warned of the poisonous chemical.

But an appeals court overturned the convictions, and the managers later pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter.

Other cases have resulted in lesser verdicts, including one that involved the worst nightclub fire in U.S. history. The 1942 fire at the Cocoanut Grove in Boston killed 492 people. The nightclub’s side doors had been bolted shut and the revolving front door was jammed with customers trying unsuccessfully to flee. A jury convicted the operator, Barrett Welansky, of wanton or reckless homicide, akin to manslaughter, and he was sentenced to 12 to 15 years in prison. But the governor pardoned him after less than four years.

A nightclub owner and the tour manager of a band were sentenced to four years in prison for involuntary manslaughter for the deaths of 100 people in a club in Rhode Island in a 2003 blaze that was started by fireworks the manager set off as part of the show.

But criminal charges against building owners can sometimes be hard to prove.

“Because we have such advanced regulatory codes, people (on juries) think of this as a regulatory crime” and are often reluctant to convict building owners of criminal homicide, said Weisberg, the Stanford law professor.

One illustration comes from a recent case in Portland, Maine.

A landlord, Gregory Nisbet, was charged with six counts of involuntary manslaughter for the deaths of six tenants at his apartment building in 2014. Prosecutors offered evidence that the smoke detectors had been disabled and that the building was poorly maintained and lacked sufficient exits. But a judge, who heard the case without a jury, ruled in October that none of the defects had caused the deaths, and convicted Nisbet only of a misdemeanor violation of the fire codes.

Such a verdict is also possible in California, where owners who violate building codes can be let off with fines, while manslaughter and murder convictions require proof that the violations or other wrongdoing caused the deaths.

Survivors of the victims of this weekend’s Ghost Ship fire can also file damage suits against the building’s owner, his chief tenant who leased the spaces, and possibly the promoter of the concert that brought people to the warehouse Friday night, said UC Berkeley Law Professor Mark Gergen. The main obstacle, he said, is that the operators of such “gray economy” enterprises typically have few assets and no insurance.

One entity that will be off the hook is the city of Oakland, for failing to conduct an inspection that might have shut the building down. A 1963 state law shields local governments from liability for harm allegedly caused by not performing inspections.

Bob Egelko is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: begelko@sfchronicle.com

Twitter: @egelko