The corporation should not be held criminally responsible. Civilly liable? Sure. Criminally liable, nope.

Hear me out.

If there was criminal fraud, the PEOPLE who made the suggestion/decision to knowingly commit criminal fraud and anyone who knowingly went along with or facilitated the fraud should be held criminally liable.

If you hold the corporation criminally liable, the corporation faces fines that will go to the state and often do little to help the victims themselves. Oh yeah, promises of the money being used to care for or compensate the victims will be made, but they rarely follow through to any meaningful extent.

Further the fines will often be same enough that they have no significant, long term impact on the company. A two or three year hit on the balance sheet at best.

If you make the fine large enough to do real damage, you risk hurting a lot of people who had nothing to do with the criminal act. Employees and people who have their pensions wound up in the company's stock among others.

And the company will often settle (accept a plea) without really admitting to any wrong doing by any specific member of management or the staff.

Now, if a guy in the C Suite thinks that a little "harmless fudging of some test numbers" might result in jail time and significant personal fines, he might think twice about it. If a guy in R&D thinks skipping some important tests or ignoring potentially negative test results might send him to jail, he might think twice about it.

I'm not saying every time somebody dies because of a design flaw in a product someone should be charged with murder, I'm saying there's a difference between an engineering error and intentionally cutting corners and releasing a defective product because you cut corners or ignored problems.