The Levandowski case is focused on just nailing him on the things they're super confident about, so I don't think it's surprising that the software in this case is part of that list - not least because they had no way of knowing Levandowski stole it until this independent expert verified it.

As I remember it, they had pretty good logs. The indictment mentioned "over 14,000" files he downloaded.

I just had a thought, wasn't this accident after the Levandowski thing? I wonder if Uber pulled a bunch of code for fear of infringing on waymo and put in this crappy hacky code. They probably didn't want the Levandowski case to appear to slow down their progress.