I mean, their negligence literally killed 2 planes full of people. It’s hard to view this in a way that ISN’T a jailable offense, at the very least.

>It’s hard to view this in a way that ISN’T a jailable offense, at the very least.

It's highly likely that no one jail-able person (you can't jail a corporate entity) had enough information and knowledge of the situation to meet the criteria of criminal negligence. Nobody knows the full picture. That's just the nature of building a large system like this. I know what my code does. I have a pretty good idea of how it affects the whole system. I can reason able what edge cases I don't know about might cause my portion of the system to do. I can't (with any reasonable degree of confidence) reason about the end result of that edge case being fed through the entire system.

I call BS on that. The person who designed the software knew about testing for mission critical code and if they didn't know, they shouldn't have been hired. The investigation into Toyota's unintended acceleration problems found a widespread corporate culture of ignoring known protocols in the testing of mission critical software. Is this the same problem Boeing has?

Even this story manages to confuse the people responsible with the company where they work. It says "Boeing didn't know the feature was optional." What a crock. Surely someone knew, like the person who decided to make it optional, for starters!

Instead of jailing the corporation or fining them, the U.S. government should instead forcibly dilute the company's shares. Obviously you can't put a price on killing two full planes worth of people, but you can instead hit the investors where it would likely force their hands the most. The fine would be that some large (double digit) percentage of Boeing becomes nationalized and all the shareholders have their shares diluted and the U.S. government now has corporate voting rights, etc.

If the corporation has a person then we can jail a person for crimes. The "person" is not allowed to do business or communicate with other persons, corporate or otherwise, without oversight.

Just jail them for revenge, then? The public isn’t at risk if you just ban them from engineering again.

>Just jail them for revenge, then?

That's the cornerstone of the American justice system, yes.

It might make CEOs care more about safety of their product. Specifically, it might balance out the commercial pressures to take risk for profit.

If calculated risks by coorperations regarinding safety come down on the less risky side, that is a good thing.

No, no. Jail time would definitely make this problem, and many similar corporate malfeasance problems, go away.