The Justice Department plans to allow Boeing to avoid a criminal trial if it agrees to plead guilty to a fraud charge stemming from two fatal crashes of its 737 Max more than five years ago, according to two lawyers for families of the crash victims.
Cassell, who represents more than a dozen of the families, said that he and the families found the deal to be “outrageous” and that it fell far short of what they had sought. He described the offer as a “sweetheart plea deal” because it would not force Boeing to admit fault in the deaths of the 346 people who died in the crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia in late 2018 and early 2019.
The 2021 criminal charge centered on two employees who were accused of withholding information from the FAA about changes made to software known as MCAS, which was later implicated in the crashes. In May, the Justice Department found that Boeing had broken the agreement by failing to adequately prevent subsequent violations of U.S. fraud laws in its operations. In a statement at the time, Boeing said it believed that it had honored the terms of the earlier agreement.