Boeing 737 MAX crash victims’ families could disrupt new plea deal with US
The opinions expressed here are those of the author, a columnist for Reuters.
By Alison Frankel
July 8 (Reuters) -Almost as soon as the U.S. Justice Department disclosed a proposed criminal plea agreement on Sunday with Boeing to resolve the government’s investigation of two fatal 737 MAX crashes, families of some of the victims announced opposition to the deal.
In a court filing on Sunday night, the families of more than a dozen crash victims told the Texas federal judge who will decide whether to accept Boeing’s $243.6 million plea deal that they intend to argue the agreement fails to hold the aerospace company accountable for the deaths of 346 passengers and crew members on the doomed 737 MAX planes, which crashed in Indonesia in 2018 and Ethiopia in 2019.
“The critical problem is that the agreement skates by the main harm Boeing committed,” said University of Utah law professor Paul Cassell, who represents several crash victims' families, in an interview on Monday morning. “The main point of the criminal case was never about money. It was always about accountability.”
Cassell said his clients want Boeing officials explicitly to admit that the company is responsible for the plane crashes. He and other lawyers for family members, according to a Reuters report last month, have urged the Justice Department to demand nearly $25 billion in penalties from the company.
Will the families’ arguments make a difference? After all, Cassell and other lawyers for victims'families previously tried and failed to block Boeing’s 2021 deferred prosecution agreement with the Justice Department.
But, as I’ll explain, the families won an important interim ruling in their ultimately unsuccessful challenge to that agreement, which secures their right to speak on behalf of the victims of Boeing’s alleged criminal conspiracy to defraud the Federal Aviation Administration.
And because of key differences in judges’ authority over deferred prosecution deals and plea agreements, the families’ objections may carry significantly more weight this time around.
There is a real possibility, in other words, that victims’ families could disrupt this deal.
Boeing and its outside counsel from Kirkland & Ellis and McGuireWoods did not respond to a query on the families’ announced objection.
A Justice Department spokesperson said via email that the plea agreement provides victims’ families with all available legal remedies, including full rights to any court-ordered restitution for their relatives’ deaths.
The Justice Department also said in both the email statement and in a court filing on Sunday night that the proposed plea agreement reflects concerns that family members expressed to the government in several hours-long conferences in April, May and June. By way of example, the Justice Department said, the plea deal requires Boeing board members to meet with victims' families and gives families a say in the appointment of a monitor to oversee the company’s compliance efforts.
Those provisions are already a victory for family members. When victims’ families first tried back in 2021 to derail the government’s deferred prosecution deal with Boeing, the Justice Department argued that family members were not technically victims of Boeing’s alleged conspiracy to defraud the U.S. government and therefore did not have rights under the Crime Victims’ Rights Act, a federal law granting a formal voice to crime victims. (The Justice Department, I should note, prefaced that argument with an acknowledgement that family members had suffered “indescribable and irreparable losses” and an apology for failing to meet with the families before making a deal with Boeing.)
U.S. District Judge Reed O'Connor of Fort Worth, Texas, sided with the families in an October 2022 decision, holding crash victims’ survivors are covered by the Criminal Victims' Rights Act. O’Connor granted the families’ request for a public arraignment of Boeing and allowed more than a dozen family representatives to testify about the impact of what O’Connor has called “perhaps the deadliest corporate crime in our nation's history.”
But the judge subsequently denied the families’ request that he reject or substantively change the deferred prosecution agreement between Boeing and the Justice Department. The families appealed that decision, but O’Connor's decision was upheld by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
The problem for the families, as the 5th Circuit explained, is that trial courts have extremely limited authority over deferred prosecution deals, in which prosecutors agree to postpone criminal charges as long as defendants comply with the government’s terms.
Under the U.S. Constitution’s separation of powers doctrine, the appeals court said, prosecutorial discretion belongs to the executive branch, not to courts. So if federal prosecutors opt to defer charges, judges generally can’t interfere.
But that is no longer the posture of the government's criminal case against Boeing.
After a door plug flew off of an Alaska Air Boeing 737 MAX jet in midflight last January, the Justice Department concluded in May that Boeing had breached the terms of its deferred prosecution agreement. As prosecutors weighed bringing criminal charges against the planemaker, the Justice Department took care to meet with the families of crash victims, in a nod to O’Connor’s ruling on the families' rights as crime victims.
The proposed deal disclosed on Sunday night, as Reuters reported on Monday, requires Boeing to plead guilty to conspiring to defraud the government and to pay the additional $243.6 million fine.
Crucially, the plea agreement — unlike Boeing’s deferred prosecution agreement — must be approved by O’Connor. That requirement, said family members’ lawyer Cassell, give his clients a shot at blocking the deal.
“The standard that a judge applies when reviewing a plea deal is more rigorous than it is for a deferred prosecution agreement,” said Cassell. “Make no mistake: Judge O’Connor has the authority to reject the plea agreement.”
The Justice Department is already bracing for the families’ opposition. Prosecutors told O’Connor that they’d demanded additional concessions from Boeing after meeting several times with family members and their counsel, but that some family members continued to oppose the deal. (The Justice Department did not say how many families are opposed.) The government asked the judge to postpone a hearing to give both sides time to submit briefs on the proposed deal and to allow family members to make travel plans to attend a hearing in person.
Cassell, a retired federal judge, told me that the crash victims’ families have already succeeded in “shaking up business as usual in the criminal division of the Justice Department.” Now we’ll see if his clients and other families can use their leverage to force additional relief from Boeing.
Read more:
Boeing to plead guilty to fraud in US probe of fatal 737 MAX crashes
How Boeing's plea deal could affect the planemaker
US to criminally charge Boeing, seek guilty plea, sources say
(Reporting By Alison Frankel)
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