Proving something like criminal negligence is extremely hard.

The supply chain of software in aerospace is extremely long and finding out who exactly was acting negligent is near impossible.

The supply chain is long but it's supposed to have exceptionally detailed documentation. Follow that document trail and start prosecuting people when those documents start turning sour, because not documenting the work properly is a crime in itself.

This won't be sufficient to fix Boeing, but it would be a start.

> When people say I changed the culture of Boeing, that was the intent, so that it’s run like a business rather than a great engineering firm.

Yeah, hard to prove.

Stonecipher was CEO nearly 20 years ago. Are you proposing to put someone in jail for crimes which happened over a decade after he left the company. Someone which has certainly ZERO knowledge of anything related to the MAX?

It is not illegal to be a bad CEO.

Absolutely. If he made systemic changes to the company (and those are proveable) that focused on profit over security he belongs in jail, no matter how long it took for the murder to take effect.

He lead an airplane maker, not a coffee shop. Focusing on profit the way Boeing did was planning a murder and trying to reap the profit in the meantime. All the participating management belongs in a court room.

Change the law so that design flaws arising from a culture/system that deprioritizes safety are considered criminally negligent for upper management (at least for safety critical domains like aircraft or cars).

Then you just have to prove that they intentionally deprioritized safety/engineering in their systems and culture.