NASA Learned from Challenger – and Columbia Still Happened

In my previous post, I suggested that NASA’s Formal Dissent Process might offer a useful model for criminal justice. The response I received, and a closer look at NASA’s own history, led me to a harder conclusion: formal dissent is necessary, but not sufficient.

The reason is Columbia. After the Challenger disaster, NASA undertook extensive reforms intended to improve internal communication, oversight, and the handling of dissent. Yet seventeen years later, Columbia was lost in another disaster marked by strikingly similar organizational failures.

The deeper challenge, then, is not simply to create a formal channel for dissent, but to build an organizational culture in which dissent is actively valued, challenging information cannot be filtered out before it reaches decision-makers, and failures, near misses, and “good catches” become routine opportunities for collective learning.

The problem is hardly abstract. On August 17, 2026, Gothamist published a disturbing investigation into one of New York’s most serious wrongful-conviction cases, arising from the Queens District Attorney’s Office. Three men – George Bell, Rohan Bolt, and Gary Johnson – spent a combined nearly 75 years in prison for murders they did not commit. When their convictions were vacated in 2021, Judge Joseph Zayas found that prosecutors had possessed police reports pointing to other suspects, as well as significant information concerning the prosecution’s key witness, none of which had been disclosed to the defense. He wrote that the prosecution had “completely abdicated its truth-seeking role.”

Following the ruling, disciplinary complaints were filed against seven prosecutors. Five years later, the attorney grievance committee concluded that there was insufficient evidence that the prosecutors had violated the rules governing attorney conduct and closed the complaints. Its notice consisted of only five sentences and did not explain what had been examined or how the decision had been reached.

James Doyle published an essay prompted by the case. He argues that we should not stop at the obvious question: Which prosecutor was at fault? When a failure this serious occurs, we must also examine the organizational system in which the individuals were operating. Drawing on Diane Vaughan’s analysis of the Challenger disaster, he asks whether failure sometimes results not from deviation from organizational norms but from conformity to them – from work processes and professional cultures that gradually normalize dangerous practices.

The Bell-Bolt-Johnson case in Queens is not an isolated example. In a July 2026 overview, the Death Penalty Information Center reported more than 600 instances in which a capital conviction or death sentence had been overturned, or a death-row prisoner exonerated, as a result of prosecutorial misconduct. Of the 202 death-row exonerations then identified since 1973, at least 144 – roughly 70 percent – involved prosecutorial misconduct. Withholding favorable evidence was the most common category.

These figures suggest that the challenge is not only how to respond to individual wrongdoing after the fact, but how to design institutions capable of detecting and interrupting dangerous decision-making before it produces irreversible harm.

In recent years, several people who were junior members of the justice system while major criminal cases were making headlines have spoken to me candidly, years later, about what they witnessed and thought at the time. In one case, which ended in a unanimous full acquittal after nearly five years, the deputy prosecutor on the case told me years later that she regretted not withdrawing from it in real time. An intern in the same prosecution office told me that he had protested and asked how an indictment could possibly be filed on the basis of the evidence before the team.

In another case, involving an........

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