In practice, few punitive laws are applied to corporations and are mostly used to control real people. This goes even more for the criminal side of law in which corporations cause death but don't receive criminal punishments (at the level of real people) in practice.

While part of me would like to see criminal cases about these things, a chain of bad management decisions I assume are likely to result in a situation where no one person(s) is likely to be criminally at fault for even the most horrific situations.

Judge Reed O'Connor, of the U.S. District Court in Fort Worth, Texas, said he disagreed with the Justice Department that dismissing the case is in the public interest but said he did not have authority to reject the decision.

He added the government's deal with Boeing "fails to secure the necessary accountability to ensure the safety of the flying public."

(Per non-paywalled article on the same topic https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/boeing-criminal-case-agreement...)

Most of the civil cases were settled out of court, but there are still about a dozen ongoing. In one, an eight-person jury in Chicago will decide damages. A point of contention is whether passengers suffered pain in their final moments. Due to the way "pain and suffering" damages work, this is likely to have substantial bearing on the result.

https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/civil-trial-737-max-cras...

Does that mean from a manufacturer perspective it's less costly if your faulty plane kills people quickly, like a bug being splatted, rather than hanging on longer and putting passengers through a grueling ordeal? In a sense, does that create somewhat perverse incentives? Or is this a pretty unique scenario due to the nature of the malfunction and its direct involvement on G-forces passengers experienced prior to the crash?