Prison sentence For COSCO Busan pilot
John Joseph Cota, the pilot aboard the COSCO Busan, a 900-foot containership when it collided with the San Francisco Bay Bridge, was sentenced last week to serve 10 months in federal prison by U.S. District Court Judge Susan Illston for the Northern District of California.
The Justice Department said Cota gave commands that caused the 65,131-ton Hong Kong-registered ship to collide with the bridge on Nov. 7, 2007.
Cota was sentenced on Friday according to an agreement in which he pleaded guilty to negligently causing discharge of a harmful quantity of oil in violation of the Clean Water Act (CWA), as amended by the Oil Spill Act of 1990 — a law passed in the wake of the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster — and to violating the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, by causing the death of protected species of migratory birds. The Justice Department said the ship discharged about 53,000 gallons of oil into San Francisco Bay,
In papers filed in court, prosecutors told the judge that Cota should receive a prison sentence because he was “guilty of far more than a mere slip-up or an otherwise innocuous mistake that yielded unforeseeably grave damage. Rather, he made a series of intentional and negligent acts and omissions, both before and leading up to the incident that produced a disaster that, as widespread as it was, could have had even worse consequences.”
Prison sentence For COSCO Busan pilot
