7 ms·

You can not punish someone for a crime they didn't commit and had no knowledge of. That is ridiculous and a perversion of justice.

• squigz 2y ago
  It seems to me the real perversion of justice is executives constantly avoiding consequences for their actions
  • constantcrying 2y ago
    It is not illegal to be a bad CEO. CEOs, surprisingly are protected by the law as well.
    • asimpletune 2y ago
      Maybe in some cases it should be?
      • Arnt 2y ago
        It is in some cases.
    • thoronton 2y ago
      If you are such a bad CEO that over 200 People die because of your bad management, then that should definitely be illegal. For what do they get the millions if not for taking responsibility?
      • ryandrake 2y ago
        LOL To these guys, “taking responsibility” means simply making a sad face and issuing a press release saying “we’re sorry.”[1]. Not actually taking responsibility and going to prison. 1: https://youtu.be/15HTd4Um1m4 https://youtu.be/15HTd4Um1m4
    • orbital-decay 2y ago
      It is illegal to be a bad engineer or a doctor, in certain cases. Why not CEO?
    • diffeomorphism 2y ago
      So you want to argue that it was not criminal fraud but blatant incompetence? Interesting angle of defense, but I wouldn't give it a high chance of success.
• michaelt 2y ago
  If the ship's captain was asleep in a drunken stupor while the 17 year old helmsman crashed the ship into an iceberg, should the captain go unpunished? I feel that punishing sobriety and rewarding drunkenness is probably not a good idea, if we want to avoid our ships hitting icebergs.
  • constantcrying 2y ago
    Bad analogies won't help anyone. Did the CEO believe his people were incompetent to develop and verify the software?
    • consp 2y ago
      > Did the CEO believe his people were incompetent to develop and verify the software? Did the CEO create the culture in which they could not despite being able to?
      • vmladenov 2y ago
        IIUC the decisions that led to the 737 Max happened under the prior CEO Muilenburg. Calhoun is just the fall guy. He wasn’t even CEO when the crashes happened. He should bear responsibility for the door plugs, though.
    • close04 2y ago
      Analogies don't have to be perfect unless you don't want see inconvenient arguments. Boeing CEO(s) shot hundreds of people in the head and then claimed they had no idea the gun was loaded and the safety was off. "My assistants said it's fine to point and shoot". It's not about the result or what the CEO "believes", it's about what they reasonably did to avoid bad outcomes. Did the CEO do anything to be certain his people are competent, or that an incompetent person cannot tank the quality of the product? Did they take any reasonable measures, implemented checks, ordered audits, spent more to prioritized safety and quality? The CEO has the highest executive authority and the highest pay. This means the highest level of accountability. Until the shit hits the fan, or the ground, and then the employees were incompetent, the processes were weak, the consultants that weren't picked by the CEO said it's all good. The reason they get away with this isn't that the law protects them, it's that they fill pockets and buy laws to protect them. Random "Empty Pockets" Joe won't get a pass for building something that kills people because they didn't bother to verify anything.
• VBprogrammer 2y ago
  There were two crashes. After the first crash Boeing were quite happy to pin the blame on the Lion Air pilots. At that point the C suite were definitely involved in every decision.
  • zarzavat 2y ago
    Exactly this. The first crash was negligent design of a technical system. The second crash was murder. The regulators are also culpable since the design of the system was in the public domain before the second crash and they did nothing about it.
    • swarnie 2y ago
      > The second crash was murder. No civilised justice system in the world is getting to murder from these facts. Manslaughter via negligence if you're feeling really lucky
      • zarzavat 2y ago
        Depends on if it could be shown that the decision to not ground was motivated by a desire for profit or not.
        • gruez 2y ago
          Still not murder unless they intended for the deaths to occur.
          • immibis 2y ago
            > The felony murder rule is a rule that allows a defendant to be charged with first-degree murder for a killing that occurs during a dangerous felony, even if the defendant is not the killer.
            • gruez 2y ago
• roenxi 2y ago
  And the level of risk the CEO/C Suite would have to take on would be insane. Who would want to be in charge of an aerospace company if there was a real risk that you'd get charged with murder if you don't have an almost psychic insight into the technical decisions of your company? There'd be a filtering effect where the best and brightest avoid industries where we need them to be. That standard would likely reduce the quality of the leadership and bias it further towards people who are delusional about safety.
  • tossandthrow 2y ago
    Why, again, are the c suite being paid as much as they do if not to take on this risk?
    • roenxi 2y ago
      To fullfill their role? Management and making decisions? Taking on personal risk has never been a part of the C suite beyond the tradition of giving them shares as part of their compensation. Shareholders use positive incentives, not negative ones. Because positive incentives generally lead to better results in this case.
      • tossandthrow 2y ago
        Seems like the US has some really weird rules in this regard then. For the C-suite to take on personal risk is literally a part of the role where I live. the central business registry register those holding these roles for that exact reason.
      • TheOtherHobbes 2y ago
        In this case they've clearly done the opposite. You seem to be arguing that the C-suite can do anything it wants to. As long as it does it in an official capacity, it can cause whatever harm it wants. That seems like a very strange argument. Do you believe corporations and corporate officers have no moral obligation to act ethically? Because if so, I'm finding it hard to understand the difference between a corporation and a crime family.
• jltsiren 2y ago
  In the legal culture I'm familiar with, the CEO and the board of directors can be held liable for everything the company does. If they are not aware of the crime but they should have been, it can be seen as gross negligence. As far as I understand, the legal theory is that the CEO and the directors are organs of the company rather than natural persons when acting in their roles. Therefore some of the usual legal protections do not apply. Assigning liability like that is an inherent part of the social trade-off that allows limited liability companies to exist.
  • bilbo0s 2y ago
    You are all arguing irrelevant points. Because the premise is false. You can identify the people responsible. I won't bother to explain it all, but at very step of the manufacturing process different workers signed off on the integrity of their work. All of that paperwork was logged with the US government. If you let me peruse those papers I could tell you who designed each and every component of the landing gear, and which workers assembled that landing gear on each and every MAX out there. I can tell you which executives signed off on it, and if you subpoena the documents I could even tell you what they were all emailing back and forth. More importantly, I can tell you which QA engineers and executives were involved in the QA and testing process for that landing gear and give you the results of the tests they ran. So on and so forth, all the way up to the CEO. We can identify people. We've simply decided that we won't. You guys are arguing an orthogonal point as to whether or not to hold C level executives accountable. I can tell you right now you're going to effect much better change if you target key executives at the director-VP level than if you target C level people. We do need to get rid of the rats. And a lot of those are C level executives, but it's important right now to get rid of all the rats. And right now, many of those rats are being promoted.
    • ImPostingOnHN 2y ago
      The CEO is accountable for culture and hiring, good or bad. If someone below them hired poorly, the CEO failed by hiring a poor hiring manager. As the poster above said, the buck stops at the top. If some random person on the floor didn't properly log a maintenance activity, that is the CEO's fault for not creating a culture in which proper documentation is properly stressed. Again, the buck stops at the top. That person on the floor must be, and usually is, indemnified, because it's more important to get open and honest feedback from them on what happened. That way we know the changes the CEO failed to implement to prevent it from happening, and should now implement to prevent it from happening again. This is because the buck stops at the top.
• josefx 2y ago
  > and had no knowledge of. A the time honored excuse of "sorry mister officer I did not know the car I was driving was stolen, I just found it on the road a few days ago and had no idea I swear".
• davedx 2y ago
  Who didn't have any knowledge of what, here? Are you saying the CEO of Boeing had no idea what was going on with the 737 MAX program?
• glimshe 2y ago
  Part of the reason the C suite makes outrageous salaries is that they have much more responsibility than the rest of us. They didn't have the intention to harm people but it's nonetheless their fault if they didn't put in place proper and reasonable procedures to prevent the problems.
• ionwake 2y ago
  They did commit it by accepting their role, their responsibility for their team, the higher salary for the higher responsibility and the dereliction of their duties. You are the one person on the planet (I hope) who believes a leader is not responsible for those under his leadership. Before you take offence understand this is just a difference of opinion of what a leader is, nothing against you personally.
• jajko 2y ago
  No its called a healthy society. The reason - There is usually surprisingly little actual skill gap between good seasoned (higher) middle managers and c-suite. What gets you up there is politics, clever sociopathic games, tenacity, connections, and often a bit of luck. If you look for words like additional competence among that list, you wouldn't find it. The only reasons some folks push up there to the top are 2 - power, and money. They receive extra money because they are holding massive responsibility for their part or whole corporation. Lets stop finding reasons why there is actually 0 real responsibility on them. Its literally part of the deal they sign up for, and they know it very well. Yes, it may sometimes mean that they get the heat for something caused by their predecessors, its part of the risk they take on themselves by pushing into such role. Its still firmly their failure, ie to a) identify it; b) act upon it. But as we see this wasn't a priority in Boeing, and I presume it still isn't.
• tremon 2y ago
  Prime counterexample: Sarbanes-Oxley. Yes, you can punish people for failing to comply with legal obligations, even if they had no specific knowledge of the obligation not being met.
  • bluGill 2y ago
    Ignorance of the law has never been an excuse. You are expected to know all the laws that apply to you.
    • zdw 2y ago
      The law being so wide ranging, complicated, and subject to interpretation based on previous decisions (in may jurisdictions) it's practically impossible to know definitively every law that applies to you, even for an expert. Now, knowing what the law is in specific, narrow areas that you're operating in, or with sufficient budget to hire experts, that's something different, and might be closer to knowable.
      • bluGill 2y ago
        I fully agree with you, but that doesn't change anything about my statement. Even if you don't know what the law is you are still responsible for following it correctly.
        • zdw 2y ago
          Maybe the point I was trying to make is whether the statement is practical and/or reasonable or not.
• whaleofatw2022 2y ago
  Parents can absolutely be responsible (at least financially) for crimes that a minor child under their care did. Doesn't matter if they weren't around at the time and told them not to do it. Besides, Understaffed/Poorly staffed orgs tend to have more issues like this anyway... which tends to be the result of executive decisions, right? Being too insulated from day to day ops is a symptom, not an excuse.
• sumedh 2y ago
  Does management get to enjoy profits/bonuses when things are going good, if yes then why can they share the pain as well?
• hnthrow289570 2y ago
  We should certainly do something about CEOs being in charge of large multi-billion dollar companies, rarely having direct consequences, and still being rich. It is currently reasonable that a CEO might not know everything when something happens the first time in a huge company. We shouldn't have only one person responsible, but likely a group. This is more important in safety critical industries, but less so for something like a luxury goods company, so you wouldn't want to force every company to this structure. This is currently an advantageous single point-of-failure for companies and CEOs, and the advantage grows the more safety critical the industry that they're in. The company structure prevents any real responsibility except when the crime is blatant (like the CEO was recorded or wrote down something).
• harimau777 2y ago
  CEOs get paid massive amounts for supposedly being responsible for the company. So why shouldn't they be held responsible for the company?
• mihaic 2y ago
  What about a crime that was in their job description to have knowledge of? Would a doctor not be liable if he didn't properly diagnose a patient? There is an assumption of minimal professional competency when you assume the responsibility of that role.
  • fwip 2y ago
    Doctors are definitely not liable for misdiagnoses.
    • mihaic 2y ago
      I'm pretty sure that you can sue for malpractice should the misdiagnosis fall below a minimum standard of conduct. In practice, misdiagnosis is not easy to prove, but we're talking Boeing executive level of incompetence here.
• bombcar 2y ago
  Why not? It happens all the time, to various degrees of "punish", especially in civil cases. You are responsible for your property (land) and can be sued quite successfully for issues you had no knowledge of and no way of knowing.
• philipov 2y ago
  Yes you can, it's called Strict Liability. That's the risk they're getting payed billions of dollars to make sure they get right. It's their job to have the knowledge and make sure it doesn't get committed.
• alwa 2y ago
  If you incentivize ignorance, then that’s what you get more of. If all I have to do to avoid responsibility is to cover my eyes and plug my ears after I chuck the figurative grenade into the operation, then then expect me to develop an enthusiastic case of “la la la I can’t hear you!” even in reaction to normal decisions, just in case. It feels like maybe the financial industry made some reforms along these lines, right? Where they established that somebody specific in an executive position was required to sign personally guaranteeing that various financial filings were not fraudulent? Presumably that personal risk incentivized said executive staff to want to know more rather than less, and the residual risk (of having to stand by your word) became priced into the pay packages.