Jurist-prudence
You’ve probably seen the videos.
You may have watched the first-person accounts posted on
TikTok showing what it was like on Alaska Airlines Flight 1282
when the door plug on a Boeing 737 Max blew out over
Portland, Oregon. It will probably come as no surprise
then that lawsuits are already being filed.
Several travelers are suing Boeing for failing to ensure
that the airplane was airworthy. Stockholders have filed
a complaint alleging that Boeing misled them about the
safety of its products.
But a legal action that deserves attention both for its origin
story and for the outsize impact it seeks to achieve is one that
was filed in Texas years before things went awry on Flight 1282.
Although Boeing is the subject of the case,
the defendant is the Department of Justice.
And these plaintiffs are not asking for money.
Their goal is to make public the details of the crime committed
by Boeing that led to the deaths of their loved ones
on the two 737 Max crashes in 2018 and 2019.
The families have challenged a plea deal negotiated in secret
between Boeing and federal prosecutors.
They say Boeing needs to be put on trial so the public can
hear all the facts about what is now the most notorious
airliner of the 21st century.
Suing the DOJ is a tactic Paul Cassell,
a University of Utah law professor and one of the attoгneys representing the plaintiffs, has used before, albeit in a
very different kind of case.
In 2008 the former federal judge represented the victims of
convicted sҽx offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Cassell argued that the women who had been assaսlted and
trafficked by the now-deceased financier were denied their
right to be consulted by the prosecutors about how the case
would be handled.
Under the federal Crime Victims’ Rights Act,
prosecutors in both the Epstein and Boeing cases were
obligated to keep the victims informed as the cases wound
their way through the justice system,
but that did not happen.
The families learned of the agreements
(called deferred prosecution agreements or
(non-prosecution agreements) after the fact.
“How did this secret DPA get negotiated?
What is it covering up?
What is involved with these later accidents and incidents?”
said Cassell.
The Epstein and Boeing cases are similar in other ways.
In exchange for acknowledging their crimes,
Boeing and Epstein were able to avoid a trial and
a prison sentence.
Prosecutors limited the scope of the wrongdoing,
in Epstein’s case, by granting blanket immunity to a nameless
and numberless group of people who helped him sҽxually
as--ult teenagers.
In the Boeing DPA, prosecutors concluded that the
plane-maker’s fraud was not pervasive across the organization
carried out by many employees, or facilitated by senior mismanagement.
This was in contrast to the House Committee on Transportation
and Infrastructure, which described
a “culture of concealment”
at Boeing and did not confine Boeing’s crimes to a limited few.
The conclusion of prosecutors also defied logic,
according to Jesse Eisinger, author of The Chickenshit Club,
which examines the two-decade-long trend toward resolving
corporate crimes with negotiated agreements.
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https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/02/doj-boeing-jeffrey-epstein-super-max-crash.html