Judge throws out Boeing plea deal over DEI provision

FORT WORTH, Texas (CN) — U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor took issue with the proposed federal monitor process in his rejection of a plea deal Thursday between Boeing and the U.S. government after the aerospace company previously agreed to plead guilty to a criminal fraud charge stemming from two 737 Max crashes that killed a combined 346 people.

Boeing admitted to deceiving federal regulators about the safety of the 737 Max’s flight control system, which was a key factor in the crashes. It agreed in July to plead guilty to one charge of conspiracy to defraud the United States. Under the plea agreement, the company would pay up to $487 million in fines, a fraction of the $24.8 billion that the families of people who died in the crashes want it to pay.

In his ruling, O’Connor, a George W. Bush appointee, noted the terms under which a federal monitor would be appointed to oversee Boeing’s compliance with safety and anti-fraud measures. He specifically objected to a provision of the plea agreement stating that the monitor would be selected “in keeping with the (Justice) Department’s commitment to diversity and inclusion.”

O’Connor accused the government of providing “shifting and contradictory explanations” of what this provision meant. He worried that the monitor could be appointed based on race as opposed to merit.

“It seems fundamentally inconsistent for the government to say ‘in keeping with the department’s commitment to diversity and inclusion’ means that the government will not consider race,” O’Connor wrote.

O’Connor also said the plea agreement “improperly marginalizes” the court in the selection and monitoring of the federal monitor.

Boeing and the Justice Department did not respond to after-hours requests for comment on the ruling.

Relatives of those killed in the crashes had urged the court to reject the plea agreement, accusing federal prosecutors of giving Boeing a sweetheart deal.

“This was the deadliest corporate crime in history,” Paul Cassell, an attorney representing the families, told O’Connor at an October pre-sentencing hearing. “They want you to sentence as if there were not 346 deaths.”

Cassell celebrated Thursday’s ruling in a blog post on the online libertarian magazine Reason.com.

“Judge O’Connor’s emphatic rejection of the plea deal is an important victory of the families in this case and, more broadly, crime victims’ interests in the criminal justice process,” Cassell wrote. “Gone are the days when federal prosecutors and high-powered defense attorneys could just cook up backroom deals and expect judges to just blindly approve them. Victims can object — and when victims have good reasons for opposing plea deals, judges can and will reject them as against the public interest.”

It is not immediately clear where things will go from here. In his ruling, O’Connor ordered Boeing and the government to update the court in no later than 30 days on how they plan to proceed. In a notice on the Justice Department’s website, the department said that before then it will meet again with the victims’ families and their representatives to get input from them.