Boeing Plea Deal Rejected by Judge O’Connor
Today Judge Reed O’Connor rejected a proposed plea bargain between federal prosecutors and Boeing. The deal would have resolved Boeing’s criminal liability for its crime of lying to the FAA about the safety of the Boeing 737 MAX—lies that led directly and proximately to two crashes killing 346 people. The victims’ families objected to the deal, and Judge O’Connor agreed with them. He concluded the provisions in the proposed resolution concerning a corporate monitor of Boeing were not in the public interest. According, Judge O’Connor rejected the proposed plea. He gave the parties (Boeing and DOJ) thirty days to advise the court as to how they want to proceed now—via a trial or (as seems more likely) a new plea deal.
I’ve blogged about the Boeing case a number of times before. (See earlier posts here, here, here, and here.) For the last several years, I have represented families who lost loved ones in the two crashes of Boeing 737 MAX aircraft. The families want Boeing held fully accountable for the harms caused by its federal conspiracy crime of defrauding the FAA about the safety of the 737 MAX and made subject to an independent corporate monitor to ensure that no other plane will crash because of concealed safety issues. In July, DOJ and Boeing negotiated a sweetheart plea deal that did not meet these objectives. And so, in October, I argued before Judge Reed O’Connor (N.D. Texas) that he should reject the proposed plea agreement.
Today, Judge O’Connor agreed with the families and used his authority to reject the proposed plea deal. He gave two reasons.
First, Judge O’Connor was concerned about a DEI provision in the proposed plea. He concluded that, based on DOJ’s current policies, race would be part of a selection process for a corporate monitor under the plea: “[A] fair reading of the Executive Order’s text, the history of DOJ’s diversity-and-inclusion requirement, and the parties’ DEI policies—taken in totality—requires the Government to prioritize, among other things, race as part of the corporate monitor-selection process in furtherance of the goal to turn the federal workforce into ‘a model for diversity.'”
Judge O’Connor further concluded that, “[i]n a case of this magnitude, it is in the utmost interest of justice that the public is confident this monitor selection is done based solely on competency. The parties’ DEI efforts only serve to undermine thi
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