I don't quite understand the reasoning for putting her in prison.
Yes, she deserves to be punished, but surely house arrest, community service etc makes more sense for a crime of this nature, rather than using tax payer money to house her for 9 years when she isn't a credible threat to society.
I’m not someone who wants prison purely as a punitive measure. I’d much rather the focus be on rehabilitation. But you’re making it sound like Elizabeth Holmes was accused of something relatively "harmless" like insider trading, rather than what she actually did.
A small sample from Wikipedia:
> In January 2016, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) sent a letter to Theranos based on a 2015 inspection of its Newark, California lab, reporting that the facility caused "immediate jeopardy to patient health and safety" due to a test to determine the correct dose of the blood-thinning drug warfarin
What is this, army of accounts for hire to sway sympathies like its election times?
Most people in prisons, especially US prisons, are not anyhow threat to society. That 1 or 2 joints that got people in bible belt states for solid 2 years is one example.
If you are questioning basis of basically every law system in place anywhere in the world, thats a fine discussion but please frame it like that. She is a criminal, fraud, liar, thief and god knows what else, in range of hundreds of millions. Jail for her, a long one, no special sympathy for nepo kids. Sort of litmus paper of whether US justice system still works as intended.
She could not have been charged with crimes against investors if the patient's blood work results were correct. She knowingly lied about the capability of these devices knowing it would garner investors. That's the crime she got convicted of, luckely no one appears to have died from the invalid medical testing.
Prison isn't just punishment, it's a deterrent to future criminals. If white collar criminals got to chill at home for few years, do you think we would have end up with more victims of fraud, or fewer?
It's not an effective deterrent because people who commit crimes don't often stop and think "oh if I do this I will get caught." In fact if you've ever reported crimes to police as a victim you've probably had the experience that there's really not much that they do other than take a police report and if it's a crime against property basically tell you to call your insurance company. Prison is a deterrent to you or me because we think things through before we act. But criminals often have really bad impulse control relative to the general population and so any preventative measures that rely on impulse control won't work on them.
There is more than one type of criminal in the world. What you’re describing is more true of the guys spontaneously grabbing purses or backpacks, not white collar criminals who spend years planning and maintaining their crimes. They’re far more likely to weigh the risk of serious enforcement, and jail is far more of a deterrent for them.
The US has a lot of people in prison for non-violent offences. It even has a huge number of people in pre-trial detention, where other countries have better bail systems and things like electronic tagging to allow people to stay out of jail before they are convicted.
I think you’d find a lot of support for the idea that we should have fewer people total in jail (i.e. funneling drug users into medical care, use community service for non-violent property crimes, etc.) but more white collar criminals going to jail.
As a simple example, I’ve heard a lot of people of all ages comment that the bankers would repeat the kinds of crimes they committed during the mortgage bubble because they made more profits than they were fined. Jail time is far more plausibly a deterrent in those cases.
If threat to society is the only purpose to put someone behind bars, then a large swathe of the incarcerated population wouldn't be behind bars. You could make the same argument for Bernie Madoff, who probably isn't a danger to society considering his fraud is out in the open.
The nature of how the people around her exploited her also makes her a great candidate for being made an example. She has no friends to explain away her crimes, which were significant — this isn’t a Martha Stewart scenario.
Joke's on you, bankers didn't serve any jail time for 2008.
Having said that, I agree 9 years seems extensive. We're just accustomed to these long prison terms. I would have thought 2-3 years plus fines, maybe 5.
The US has the largest prison population in the world both by capita and in total numbers. This is an indication that something is horribly wrong.
(very few people should have gone to prison, but Sean Quinn did for Anglo-Irish Bank, and everyone involved in the US robo-signing fiasco should have at least got a conviction and ban from positions of trust)
We need stronger punishments for our robber barons, not weaker. We are witnessing the society we experience when they are not kept in check and it is the worst humanity has to offer.
The reasoning for putting her in prison seems to be based on the severity of doing an almost a billion dollar in fraud. That is in the ballpark of some of the worlds largest bank robberies.
There are good reason to question prison sentences for non-violent crime, and asking about the goals society has. If the goal is deterrent, then studies do show that harsher punishment can be effective if the crime is done under partial rational decision based on the risk of getting caught and the punishment if they do. If the goal is rehabilitation, then the results is less clear and may have the opposite effect.
There is a lot of research and studies on this subject. Some compare different countries, like Norway vs US, and other compare states/cities, or the same location but different years with different strategies. To my knowledge there isn't a lot of consensus in what actually works.
People like to be soft on crime, until crime happens to them.
Its the complete inability to empathize for fellow citizens that actually do the right thing, and contribute to society; instead relating with the criminal mind.
Its a very weird stockholm's syndrome offshoot.
There's a world of difference between mercy and recklessness. Justice must work for society to function. No one is getting beheaded here for stealing an apple.
in the US there is always racial aspect to this. if this was a person of color and crime was selling some shit drugs on the streets, the same commenter would be like “life in prison without parole.” but for cute white blondie it is “eh put her on house arrest, she is no danger to society” :)
Is there? Here the sentiment seems to be arguing fiercely to reinforce the incarceration of a blonde white because she defrauded. Even if the victims she defrauded were despicable elites. She's not getting a pass, at all. No robin hood here.
Then we have the drive to decriminalize drugs, driven by all citizen groups, but which mostly affects minorities only.
Aren't things moving in the right direction, at least?
The miscarriage of justice here is that she was acquitted of the widespread and deliberate medical malpractice, not that she has been jailed. She absolutely was a danger to everyone who trusted the tests from her machines.
That study doesn’t focus on people who are used to caviar and champagne as a normal thing versus an out of reach dream. These bourgeoisie think they’re untouchable, and largely are, so the threat of this is the only deterrent we have short of a Place de la Concorde situation
Exactly. The more you have to lose the worst you have it in prison.
If you already live in hell outside of prison then prison won't feel that bad. Could even feel better because it's like a dopamine detox. I'm talking here about prison not like it is depicted in Hollywood, with rape and no protection from assault. I'm talking about prison as it should be, enforcing a near monastic lifestyle where the detained has no distractions from their own conscience and can contemplate their predicament
She's a sociopath who defrauded a number of high-profile U.S. presidential cabinet officials, and was jailed for forming "the most illustrious board in U.S. corporate history" and then shamelessly deceiving them into publicly supporting her.
The support of Schultz, Kissinger, Matis et al rendered her the world's youngest self-made female billionaire, youngest recipient of the Horatio Alger Award, and Obama's Presidential Ambassador for Global Entrepreneurship. She then chilled out John Carreyrou and The Wall Street Journal financially and legally for trying to expose her deception
The only reason she was not convinced for patient fraud was a weak jury deciding the patients were "one-step removed" from Holmes as CEO.
Yes and none of these people asked anyone with clinical laboratory knowledge whether this device could work. Many analytes need a venous draw to attain accurate results. So even if they only used a drop of blood that blood would have to be obtained the same way as a tube is now.
It would be like a young man dropping out of school and claiming they have GPU technology that is 2x nvidia performance. Everyone would laugh and demand proof. But they all didn't do the most basic of due diligence here
There is a different bar for regular joe investors and "Professional Investors" [0]. These were Professional Investors.
[0] A professional investor is an individual or legal entity that possesses the experience, knowledge, and expertise necessary to make their own investment decisions and duly assess the risks associated with these decisions.
Are you talking about accredited investors? In the US, the only criteria to be an accredited investor, more or less, is having a net worth of over a million or an income over 200k. The above looks a bit more like a European definition, though even there it's optimistic, and in practice "has lots of money" is good enough for accredited investor status in the EU as well.
To be clear, most of the investors weren't VCs and things; they were, largely, individual rich idiots (or their family offices, at their direction). Theranos had trouble with real VCs, who wanted inconvenient things like audited accounts.
The rules protecting accredited investors are indeed laxer than those protecting normal people, but it is _still not legal to defraud them_.
Crypto does seem to have carved out a "most laws don't apply to us" niche, and particularly in the US this seems like it'll get worse before it gets better. That hardly excuses Holmes, though.
If someone steals from you your money , and that makes your family (including your son or daughter) destitute and unable to afford basic necessities like monthly rent so you can put a roof over your child, do you still agree ?
I think you may have a very different perspective if you and your entire family were forced to bounce around from relatives' couches every few days because you can't afford your own, or if you had to tell your child you can't pay for a bed for him/her because someone took your money.
Yes, she deserves to be punished, but surely house arrest, community service etc makes more sense for a crime of this nature, rather than using tax payer money to house her for 9 years when she isn't a credible threat to society.