Boeing case puts a spotlight on plea agreements involving corporate defendants
Prosecutors are expected to give new details next week about Boeing's plea deal in a case stemming from two deadly crashes of 737 Max jetliners
After two jetliner crashes killed 346 people, a $2.5 billion settlement that let Boeing avoid criminal prosecution failed to resolve questions about the safety of the aerospace giant's planes.
Federal prosecutors now accuse the company of failing to live up to terms of the 2021 settlement. Boeing has agreed to plead guilty to a felony fraud charge in a new deal with the Justice Department. The department said Thursday that it expects to file the detailed plea agreement no sooner than the middle of next week.
Experts on corporate behavior say whether the new agreement has a more lasting impact on safety than the earlier settlement could come down to how much power is placed in the hands of an independent monitor who is assigned to oversee Boeing for three years. Prosecutors made the appointment of such a monitor a condition of the plea deal, which also calls for Boeing to pay a new $243.6 million fine.
“Your real concern is protecting against the loss of future lives in future crashes, and that is something that the monitor can have more impact on than simply the amount of the fine," said John Coffee, a law professor at Columbia University who studies corporate governance and white-collar crime.
The finalized plea and sentence are due to be filed in U.S. District Court in Fort Worth, Texas. The filing will give a more precise description of how the compliance monitor will be chosen and the scope of the monitor's duties. Already, the government appears to have backed away from a plan that would given Boeing the biggest role in picking the watchdog.
Families of some of the
Read more on abcnews.go.com
