Today the Fifth Circuit denied my Crime Victims' Rights Act (CVRA) challenges to the Justice Department's 2021 deferred prosecution agreement (DPA) and 2025 non-prosecution agreement (NPA) with Boeing. VC readers will recall this case, as I have blogged about it many times over the years, including here, here, and here. In today's ruling, the Circuit said that the families' victims rights challenges to these agreements came too late to allow any remedy. But earlier, in 2023, the Circuit had said that the families' challenges were "premature." The fact that the families now will seemingly never receive any remedy is a cruel judicial bait-and-switch, revealing how much work remains to be done to create truly enforcable crime victims' rights in the criminal justice system.
Here's the case in a nutshell: In and around 2016 to 2019, Boeing lied to the FAA about the safety of its new 737 MAX aircraft. When two MAX aircraft crashed in late 2018 and then again in early 2019, the Justice Department investigated. And, in 2021, the Department charged Boeing with criminal conspiracy to defraud the FAA through its lies. But the Department immediately entered into a DPA in the Northern District of Texas to resolve the criminal case.
In subsequent litigation, the families proved that the 346 passengers and crew on board the two doomed 737 MAX flights were "crime victims" under the CVRA—they had been directly and proximately harmed by Boeing lies. If Boeing had revealed the safety issues surrounding the MAX to the FAA, the result would have been training of pilots that would have prevented the two crashes. This makes Boeing's conspiracy crime the "deadliest corporate crime in U.S. history," as Judge Reed O'Connor in the Northern District of Texas later described it.
