So the CEO says in court: «I am now aware that some of the issues on your jira backlog caused damage to our customers. The very-well-compensated programming team leader and the highly paid programmers reported to me that there were no such issues in the backlog, and based on their written assessment I decided to release the new version. It would be impossible for me to check every detail, and therefore unreasonable for the jury to expect that.» And the jury agrees, and someone goes to prison but it isn't the CEO.

Nice strawman. The prosecution reminds the jury that the CEO got paid 33 million before bonuses and the programmers only got 150k.

Eh, my current project manager does not even seem to check every detail and we appear to be moving by pretty dashboards, so I expect CEO will have even smaller, simpler dashboard. Fwiw, if CEO got in front of the jury, I would expect things to look bleak for the CEO ( it is not exactly a favored class now ). There is a reason it does not happen often ( for example outright fraud ala Bankman ).

Yeah, this is key. I don't see why the system shouldn't be set up that way. Company does something criminal, now boss is considered a criminal.

That is a perversion of justice. You can not transfer criminal liability for money.

Your employees can be criminals regardless of culture. The precedent this would set is ridiculous.

Who should be responsible for a company's crimes if not the people who make decisions in the company? If we want companies to have legal personhood, how about they suffer the same perils of breaking the law (prison time, etc)? Fines are just a price we set on breaking the law.

>Who should be responsible for a company's crimes if not the people who make decisions in the company?

The person committing that crime.

>If we want companies to have legal personhood, how about they suffer the same perils of breaking the law (prison time, etc)?

Companies can not be put to jail.

The people committing the crime include those who make the decisions. Hiring an assassin makes me guilty of murder.

I'm almost certain that's not true (at least, not in my own jurisdiction). Conspiracy to commit murder, perhaps. "Murder for hire" is apparently the DoJ term (https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndca/pr/murder-hire-convict-sen...).

But that's not the situation here anyway. Is an architect guilty of murder if a building he designs collapses? Flaws in his design may have contributed. What about the construction company that built it? Perhaps they were incompetent and sloppy in their construction. The suppliers might be at fault as well; they could have sold inferior steel or concrete. What about the politicians that passed faulty legislation for building codes? Does some of the blame not fall on them too? Or the maintenance company that skimped on their maintenance checks and could possibly have seen the cracks forming?

There is very rarely, despite the assurances of five-whys and other incident response practices, a clear-cut and obvious point of failure when complex systems break. The Boeing situation was a failure of culture, people say. Maybe. They justify criminal charges on the C-suite as a result. Maybe even that is just, for a certain definition of justice. But the buck doesn't have to stop there. Where are the criminal charges for the shareholders, who chose to keep these criminals at the head of the company? Where are the charges against the FAA, who continued to do leave Boeing to be its own regulator? Why not cast blame on the previous CEOs as well? After all, culture takes a long time to change, and the current CEO has only been in the role since 2020 - the MAX's first flight was in 2016!

The people in charge have to ensure that the right measures are in place to prevent illegal behavior. If they do not do that, then they are liable. At Boeing, effective measures are obviously not in place.

1) It's the CEOs job to know. Carelessness, recklessness, wilful ignorance, malice, these are all terms of art and can lead to different liabilities; as a non-lawyer I don't trust my own understanding as to the exact boundaries between them.

2) If the CEO knows, then the word "conspiracy" comes to mind, does not require them to perform the criminal act, only their agreement to act.

The criminal precedent of punishing a person for a crime they didn't commit and had no knowledge of is so bad that I honestly didn't think any reasonable person could come up with this.

There were two crashes. The CEO most certainly should have known about the problems after the first one.

It’s the CEO’s job to ensure that sufficient measures are in place to prevent failure. They should not be punished for accidents; they should be punished if the accidents were reasonably predictable.

Which was most certainly the case when they decided to the redundant AoA sensor an optional extra.

>There were two crashes. The CEO most certainly should have known about the problems after the first one.

Then drag him to court for that. But this is totally different to charging him with the crimes of other people he couldn't have known about.

What are you talking about?

From [1] in 2021:

> The airplane manufacturer broke the agreement by “failing to design, implement, and enforce a compliance and ethics program to prevent and detect violations of the U.S. fraud laws throughout its operations,” the DOJ said.

He’s not being held responsible for the crime, he’s being held responsible for looking the other way.

The CEO is 100% responsible for designing programs to ensure that the business operates within the parameters of the law.

What else do you think their job is?

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/07/doj-fines-boeing-over-2point...

> There were two crashes. The CEO most certainly should have known about the problems after the first one.

Possibly, but not if it were a one-off. Are the airlines that chose to keep flying Boeing 737 MAX not equally (or more) responsible?

After the first accident, Boeing was said to be blaming the pilots, in private, despite knowing about MCAS but not revealing it. They deliberately misrepresented the design (and in particular they minimised the severity of the failure modes) of MCAS to the FAA during the certification process. There are transcripts of the test pilots discussing this stuff. Boeing also heavily lobbied the FAA not to ground the Max 8 despite other jurisdictions grounding the aircraft.

There is plenty of evidence to suggest that Boeing knew what was going on, and if the CEO didn’t know then he wasn’t doing his job.

There really is no reason to give them the benefit of the doubt.

What amazes me is that the first crash is arguably "pilot error compounded by MCAS" but they didn't just immediately pay the tens of millions it would have cost to retrofit all existing planes with the double-sensors that were an option but not required.

Ah I see - makes sense then, if that is all accurate. It would be good to know how coordinated this was internally. If the malicious behaviour genuinely went all the way to the top, then probably those people all deserve criminal sentencing, for sure.

For me the real kicker was that Boeing convinced the FAA that the aircraft did not need redundant Angle of Attack sensors, even though they knew that this meant that there was a single point of failure in a system which had control authority (ie, MCAS).

Boeing did not disclose the existence of MCAS to pilots, and therefore did not train the pilots on how to recover from MCAS failure, and there was no redundancy in the key sensors that fed MCAS.

IIRC at least one of the crashes was caused by an AoA sensor failure.

There is immense precedent to punish a person for a crime they were responsible for and that they should have known was happening.

The software issues definitely were not something the CEO should have known about.

The CEO has the responsibility to make the company work well. If a company build products that injure or kill people, the CEO should be in trouble too. Instead of looking the other way and still get big paychecks and bonuses, improve design, testing, all company processes and make the company build products that work.

In cases like this it should be even harsher than a prison or monetary punishment, I like what China is doing by executing White collar criminals such as CEO's for negligence, fraud, causing death etc:

https://www.businessinsider.com/chinese-white-collar-crimina...