Risk communication is very difficult to do with a public that is technically and mathematically challenged, especially when different people see the same quantitative risk in different ways. See, e.g., nuclear power.

And the so-called precautionary principle is nothing more than a prescription for the society to be ruled by those who tell the scariest stories.

If you want to require certainty, then RISK has nothing to do with it. If they had said,”We cannot say with certainty that the town will not be leveled and everyone killed”, I expect they would have been sentenced over the deaths of people fleeing.

I am not sure what was said but if if amounted to “based on past experience, there is little risk of a larger, more destructive quake based on the current tremors” and that was a reasonable accurate view based on the science, what more should they have done that would not have been a distortion of the truth?

I wouldn’t have convicted them though.

You leave a distorted impression of nature.com’s article, which concludes
>for now all efforts should be channelled into protest, both at the severity of the sentence and at scientists being criminalized for the way their opinions were communicated. Science has little political clout in Italy and the trial proceeded in an absence of informed public debate that would have been unthinkable in most European countries or in the United States. Billi should promptly explain his decision, and the scientific community should promptly challenge it.
[end of quote]

I would have more sympathy with criminal prosecutions of builders who put up weak buildings in an earthquake zone, and crooked or lazy inspectors who did not call them to account.
How were the scientists supposed to know that this pattern of minor tremors would be followed by disaster, when so many others, at other times and places, were not?
The scientists may have been chosen as scapegoats in place of more culpable locals with political influence.