Two defendants.
Two verdicts. Neither position is obviously wrong.
Meridian Pharmaceuticals is a mid-sized British pharmaceutical company at the final stage of regulatory approval for Veridex, a cardiac medication six years in development. Three months before the submission deadline, safety analyst James Okafor identifies statistical anomalies in the trial data — an elevated cardiac event risk in elderly patients with pre-existing renal impairment.
His report reaches Chief Medical Officer Dr Helena Voss. She reads it. She annotates it. She does not escalate it. She delegates review to a junior colleague. The review is informal, undocumented, and inadequate. The submission proceeds. Veridex is approved. Eleven patients die — all in the exact subgroup Okafor identified.
The prosecution argues gross breach. The defence argues catastrophic but human failure. The case was designed so that reasonable juries can legitimately reach different conclusions on both defendants — what matters is the quality of the reasoning, not the outcome.
Defendant 1 — Dr Helena Voss, Chief Medical Officer, 51. Read the Okafor report. Did not escalate it.
Defendant 2 — Sarah Lind, Chief Executive Officer, 48. Says she did not know the report existed.
The charge — Corporate manslaughter: gross breach of duty of care resulting in the death of eleven patients.
The pleas — Not guilty, both defendants.
The dysfunctions you spent the morning judging in two fictional executives were operating in this room the entire time. That is not an accusation. It is an observation. What do you do with it now?