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Relatives of victims hold a placard with photos of victims of the Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 crash in March 2019, prior to a hearing in Fort Worth, Texas, in January 2023. Shelby Tauber/AFP via Getty Images hide caption
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Shelby Tauber/AFP via Getty Images
WASHINGTON — The Department of Justice told a federal judge on Friday that it reached an agreement in principle with Boeing to drop criminal charges over two fatal crashes of 737 Max jets, despite objections from family members of some crash victims.
It's the latest turn in a long-running legal saga following the fatal crashes of two 737 Max jets, in 2018 and 2019, that killed 346 people.
The Justice Department reached a deferred prosecution agreement with Boeing during the first Trump administration. But prosecutors changed course under President Biden, reviving the criminal case against the aerospace giant. Boeing agreed last year to plead guilty to defrauding regulators, but a federal judge rejected that proposed plea deal.
Now the Justice Department has reached another agreement that would allow Boeing to avoid criminal prosecution.
In a court filing, DOJ lawyers called the agreement "a fair and just resolution that serves the public." The deal "guarantees further accountability and substantial benefits from Boeing immediately, while avoiding the uncertainty and litigation risk presented by proceeding to trial," they wrote.
The DOJ said it laid out the terms of the latest deal in a meeting with family members of the victims and their lawyers last week. Some of those family members supported the deal, according to the DOJ filing.
But other family members said they're outraged by the agreement and that they plan to fight it in court.
