Digital Extra: The Station Fire

The attorney general says the 10-year limit on jail time agreed to by Great White's tour manager is at the high end of involuntary-manslaughter sentences.

01:00 AM EST on Friday, February 3, 2006

BY PAUL EDWARD PARKER
Journal Staff Writer

Attorney General Patrick C. Lynch said yesterday that arriving at a maximum sentence for the man who sparked the deadly fire at The Station nightclub was trying "to make sense of the nonsensical."

The Feb. 20, 2003, fire at the West Warwick nightclub killed 100 people and injured more than 200 others. In December of that year, a grand jury returned indictments against the brothers who owned the nightclub, Michael A. and Jeffrey A. Derderian, and against Daniel M. Biechele, the tour manager for rock band Great White, the headline act that night. He shot off fireworks that started the fire.

On Tuesday, the Superior Court announced that Biechele had agreed to plead guilty to 100 counts of involuntary manslaughter and to be sentenced to serve up to 10 years in prison. He will formally plead guilty on Tuesday, with sentencing a couple of months later.

The cases against the Derderians are still headed toward trial, though no dates have been set.

The criminal charges that resulted from the Station fire are without precedent in Rhode Island, Lynch said in an interview with The Journal, and few cases from other jurisdictions offer guidance on what sentence would be appropriate.

"You're starting in a different framework than a lot of other cases where death is involved," he said. "The first thing to remember is this is involuntary manslaughter, which is the unintentional taking of a life."

Rhode Island criminal law recognizes four levels of unjustified killing. The highest level is first-degree murder, followed by second-degree murder, voluntary manslaughter and involuntary manslaughter.

The deaths of 100 people are stunning, Lynch said, and the criminal-justice system is not capable of erasing the sorrow of people who lost loved ones in the fire. "There's nothing that can temper the pain that they're going through, because their loved ones were priceless."

At the same time, the legal system tries to rank crimes by their gravity and assign higher penalties to the greater crimes. "Each one of these people is absolutely priceless. There's no way to put a value on that," said Lynch.

Lynch said the process of arriving at an appropriate sentence requires more than "just a cold analysis of the numbers on either end." The legal system must also look at what Biechele did and whether he intended to harm or kill anyone.

"Did Dan Biechele intend in any way to do that? I would say absolutely not," said Lynch. He characterized Biechele's actions as "careless, reckless, criminal and unforgivable," adding, "Is it equal to him pulling out a weapon and shooting someone? No."

To arrive at a sentence that prosecutors could endorse, they looked outside Rhode Island, Lynch said. They examined other similar cases, such as the 1942 Cocoanut Grove fire, and the penalties prescribed by laws in other states.

By that analysis, Lynch arrived at a conclusion about the maximum of 10 years that Biechele faces. "Ten is a shockingly high number if you look at any kind of comparable historic reference."

The Cocoanut Grove fire in Boston, killed 492 people, and remains the deadliest nightclub fire in U.S. history. The owner of the club was charged with involuntary manslaughter, convicted and sentenced to serve 12 to 15 years in a Massachusetts state prison even though he was not present at the fire. He served less than four years, released from prison nine weeks before dying of cancer.

In 1977, a fire at the Beverly Hills Supper Club, in Southgate, Ky., killed 165 people. A grand jury investigated the fire, but no one was charged.

The same was true for a 1981 fire at a nightclub in Dublin, Ireland, that killed 48 people.

Last month, a federal judge imposed an 18-month sentence on the pilot who was at the wheel of New York's Staten Island Ferry in October 2003 when it crashed into a dock, killing 11 people. The pilot was charged with criminal negligence, which is analogous to Rhode Island's involuntary manslaughter.

In looking at other states, maximum penalties for involuntary manslaughter range from Rhode Island and the District of Columbia, where it is 30 years in prison, to Maine, where involuntary manslaughter is not considered a crime, but a matter for civil court. On average, the maximum penalty in other states is about 9 years. "If this happened in Connecticut, it's a one-year penalty -- maximum," said Lynch.

"Is it a trend toward criminalizing stupidity and increasing the penalty or decriminalizing it?" he said. "The trend is to decriminalize it."

Lynch acknowledged that people may be tempted to take the 10-year maximum to which Biechele has agreed and divide that number by 100 to calculate how much time he would serve for each victim.

Lynch said that Biechele would, in effect, be serving up to 10 years for each victim, but serving those 100 sentences at the same time, rather than one after the other.

Sentences like that -- called "concurrent" by the legal system -- are appropriate in this case, according to Lynch, because it was a single act that caused the 100 deaths. He contrasted it to a hypothetical case in which someone goes into an arena and fatally shoots one person after another. In a case like that, Lynch said, he would argue the sentences should be served one after another -- "consecutive" in legal parlance -- because each killing would be a separate act.

Lynch acknowledged that the families of the victims may be unhappy with Biechele's plea agreement. "You know, there's nothing you can do except give them the best that the system will get," he said. "What this brings is certainty, finality and accountability. There's nothing to suggest that the number at the end of a trial would be any different."

pparker@projo.com / (401) 277-7360