Remember the scene in Casablanca? Rick (Humphrey Bogart) has just shot the evil Major Strasser. Louis (Claude Raines), who was standing just a few feet away, blows his whistle to summon his Vichy police henchmen. When the agents arrive, Louis informs them that “Major Strasser has been shot.” After a dramatic pause and a menacing glance at Rick, he utters the line: “Round up the usual suspects.”

Some workplace fatalities and serious injuries are so egregious that they result in criminal prosecution against the company. In such instances, the “usual suspects” rounded up by prosecutors are the highest company officials. As a middle manager, the safety director is usually left out of the roundup.

But that’s not always the case. For example, New York City prosecutors are preparing to indict the safety manager of a demolition project in connection with a fire that claimed the lives of two New York firefighters. The fire took place at the Deutsche Bank Building in Lower Manhattan in 2007. Prosecutors want to charge a company executive and the site safety manager for criminally negligent homicide, claiming that they deliberately allowed work to continue even though they knew that the sprinkler system had been dismantled and the standpipe that supplied water to the upper floors and fire exits had been sealed off.

Prosecutions against safety professionals are even rarer in Canada. Last year, the safety director of a Nova Scotia construction company pleaded guilty to four OHS violations, including failure to carry out a proper safety program, after a worker died in a machine accident. The safety director, Bernard Dearing, was the only company official charged. Under Canadian OHS laws, charges can “be laid” against corporate officers, owners, supervisors and even workers themselves. But until the Dearing case, no Canadian safety director had ever been charged with a safety offense.

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