I think Kish already cut to the heart of what I wanted to say, but at the risk of reiterating: it's less that Hurak was an idiot and more that he was a jerk. He could have chosen the exact same course of action with a little more compassion and it would have made a huge difference. That seems to be the exact point 1096 makes -- Vaarsuvius, the person with the highest Intelligence score in the group, says that Hurak's decision to banish Durkon makes a certain amount of logical sense, and the also-highly-intelligent Roy concurs. But he then goes on to add that what gets him is that Hurak never told Durkon, not only because he deserved to know but because Durkon would only have hastened to follow Hurak's directives if he'd known the true motives behind them. There's no in-strip justification for the cruelty of the way the banishment was carried out, and the strong implication there is because there wasn't one. Hurak panicked, he behaved badly towards Durkon as a result, and he's being judged for it.

That's not to say it was necessarily evil or an offense warranting of eternal torture. A firing offense I think for sure -- he fell down on the job there big time. But mostly he acted badly out of fear.