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Elizabeth Holmes found guilty

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Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty

#81

Post by paxys »

sharkweek wrote: post #25

This will sound weird but I am a collector of swag from large companies that have collapsed due to anything from mismanagement to outright fraud. While we're a rare breed there are others like me out there. Still, even with this oddly specific marketplace being small, let me tell you, the Theranos swag market is hot right now (check eBay if you're curious). Wish I had gone big on this one earlier, because I have a fe…

How exactly do you check if something is authentic? I can have a hundred Theranos-branded t-shirts, mugs, pens, diaries, socks and whatever else you want made and shipped to me in like 2 weeks.

Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty

#83

Post by Overtonwindow »

I'm genuinely surprised. I thought after seven days it would be deadlocked on everything, particularly being silicon valley, successful, beautiful woman, I just didn't have a lot of faith in the jury. I guess this is a very mixed verdict.

Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty

#84

Post by rectang »

busymom0 wrote: post #12
xqcgrek2 wrote: post #7

How much time is she looking at?

Not sure but I would be interested in knowing how many years people think she deserves?

https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/01/14/elizabeth-holmes-ther...

> On Monday, U.S. Department of Justice attorneys responded. “Thousands of patients received unreliable blood tests, depriving them of money or property, placing their health at risk and, in many cases, causing actual harm,” prosecutors alleged in a filing in U.S. district court in San Jose.

Considering the vast weight of the harms she caused, in a "fair" retributive justice system, she would get far worse the sentences routinely doled out to typical criminals.

But the US "justice system" is hardly "fair".

Personally, I don't really believe in retributive justice. The light sentences afforded to privileged criminals bother me, but what bothers me more are the draconian sentences received by those of less privilege.

Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty

#85

Post by kadoban »

VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #49
celticninja wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would a mistrial be declared? Does that prevent a future prosecution of these charges?

It will likely result in a new trial of those counts.

It will depend on if the prosecutor thinks it's worth it. Often it won't be if they already got a guilty on enough counts to add up.

Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty

#87

Post by teraflop »

VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #29
passerby1 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did Theranos blood test work?

My understanding is that it worked in the sense that the results were accurate. But the results were gotten by means other than what the investors/customers thought. So the end-user patients really had no claim since they got correct results. But the companies and investors got scammed bigtime.

I haven't been following the trial closely, but I spent a bit of time skimming through some of the case documents a while back. The government's allegations included a bunch of supporting statements from doctors, who claimed that Theranos frequently gave their patients wildly inaccurate results. It sounds like they weren't able to convince the jury of Holmes' guilt on those charges.

(IIRC, Holmes' lawyers also made the argument that it was not legally possible for her to have committed wire fraud against the patients, because any money that Theranos received would have come from their insurance companies.)

Part of the difficulty is that the empirical data that would have proven how well (or poorly) the technology worked was allegedly stored in a proprietary, bespoke database. When Theranos was ordered to turn over the data to the feds for discovery, they delivered an encrypted copy, and then claimed that the encryption key was lost and the original disk arrays were unrecoverable. Both sides of the case then blamed each other for destroying the last remaining copy of the data, which made for some fun reading.

Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty

#89

Post by Overtonwindow »

goobergoo wrote: post #62
NikolaeVarius wrote: post #2

Count one of conspiring to commit wire fraud against investors in Theranos between 2010 and 2015: Guilty. Count two of conspiring to commit wire fraud against patients who paid for Theranos’s blood testing services between 2013 and 2016: Not guilty. Count three of wire fraud in connection with a wire transfer of $99,990 on or about Dec. 30, 2013: No verdict. Count four of wire fraud in connection with a wire transfer…

Boy, it's all about the wire-fraud, isn't it? The MONEY itself seems to have filed this lawsuit.

I think it's about wire fraud because the prosecution was able to prove she had motive to commit fraud. Whereas with the patients, it seems, the jury believed she did not intend to cause fraud upon the patients.

Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty

#90

Post by stock_toaster »

jonwachob91 wrote: post #40

It blows my mind that she was found guilty for defrauding investors, but not guilty for defrauding patients about their test results. Investors know that every dollar they put into a company could disappear, it's why startups get capital from investors and not bank loans. But a patient does not expect for their blood test results to be completely wrong. Her tests weren't giving false-negatives or false-positives, the…

> It blows my mind that she was found guilty for defrauding investors, but not guilty for defrauding patients about their test results.

Not excusing it, but maybe it was a company vs personal thing (eg. consumer harm perhaps didn't pierce the corporate veil[1]). Whereas Fraud against investors is much more of a personal/individual thing.

[1]: https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/piercing_the_corporate_veil

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