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Comment by rvolkan | Hacker News Reader

What happens if your #2 is applied to doctors, car/ship manufacturers, food producers, grocery stores, house builders, taxis, restaurants, software engineers, medical device producers and so on? Every profession caused accidental deaths.

"Legal action" against bad decisions is a must. However, mandatory prison sentence for accidents is a terrible idea.

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If Boeing knowingly exposed the passengers to the risk of injury it's criminal negligence and usually the punishment is imprisonment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_negligence

Exactly my point. Imprisonment should come into play when the accidents are proven to be caused by Boeing's negligence.

Is it negligence or just a bad design? Who decides? The thing is starting to look like Boeing thought that MCAS failure was similar to and corrected by the same procedure as runaway trim. Time will tell if that is the case, but if it does, should the pilots be posthumously tried for negligence?

Especially in light of the current size of the US's prison population. We should be very careful in general about advocating for more prison sentences. It's an easy thing to do, but the societal outcome is a lot more complicated.

Oh please. If there's one demographic we don't have much of in our prison system, it's upper-class corporate executives. We could stand to let some non-violent drug offenders out early to make room for them.

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