A year and a half ago, we wrote about some Italian seismologists who were being tried for manslaughter after a risk assessment they wrote up, in which they concluded that a series of small earthquakes along a faultline wasn't that serious, and the risk of a big earthquake was not that high. About a week later, a 6.3 magnitude earthquake struck, destroying a bunch of buildings and killing over 300 people.

Richard Fine, who holds a PhD in international law and served as an anti-trust prosecutor at the Department of Justice in Washington D.C., has been in jail in the L.A. County Jail for over a year in solitary confinement. He never had a trial, there has been no conviction, nor any sentence to keep him there.