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Elizabeth Holmes found guilty

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Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty

#651

Post by avgcorrection »

junon wrote: post #591
causality0 wrote: post #587

What's the takeaway from this other than "killing people by giving phony medical test results is just fine, but don't you dare anger the wealthy"?

That proving some things in court is easier than other things and by reducing down nuanced legal systems to "rich bad" doesn't help the situation any.

They may be wrong about the generalized conclusion but “some things are harder to prove” is hardly a strong argument against their claim in this specific instance.

And just throwing the word “nuance” into a comment doesn’t a counter-argument make.

Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty

#652

Post by avgcorrection »

nemo44x wrote: post #177
paxys wrote: post #140

Guilty of taking a billion+ dollars from rich and influential people who couldn't bother to do the bare minimum due diligence into their investments due to greed and FOMO. Not guilty of endangering thousands of lives by running fraudulent and inaccurate tests under sub-par lab conditions. Our justice system is such a farce.

Our justice system works well. You are confusing your own emotional feelings for what you would have liked to see with the reality of what was able to be proven without reasonable doubt. The type of populist mob justice you allude* to is not just at all. *(Fixed grammar error specified below)

Unless someone is “alluding” to a lynching then “populist mob justice” is a gross mischaracterization of laypeople expressing disdain for the justice system.

Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty

#653

Post by 2-718-281-828 »

piaste wrote: post #552
gkoberger wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with everything you said, but I think the person you're replying to is less upset at the prosecutors/jury, and more upset about the laws in the first place. They protect the rich and powerful, and don't worry about the average person getting hurt.

In this case it seems to be a matter of distance, not power. Imagine that, rather than the CEO making shit up, the case was about a lowly lab technician who faked results out of laziness or recklessness. Even though his fraud ultimately impacted the patients, he would probably still get convicted for defrauding his boss or the company he directly worked for, not the patients he never met or knew.

well distance to common people correlates at least in one direction with power ... so it is directly related.

Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty

#654

Post by marvin »

ajmurmann wrote: post #433
metadat wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hopefully she'll get more, SV could use a good example. Otherwise it signals that wantrepeneurs can keep doing it with minimal repercussions.

"Hopefully she'll get more, SV could use a good example." I knows Theranos was headquartered in Palo Alto for part of its life, but is it really a SV company? Looking at their board I see mostly old-school business people from a construction company, Wells Fargo, and James Mattis and a former head of CDC. Only real tech person seems to be someone from NetApp. On the investor side, I don't see any of the big SV names…

You could draw the conclusion that most experienced Silicon Valley folks saw it coming.

Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty

#655

Post by richardwhiuk »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #391
petilon wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's an example of a fakery that doesn't harm innocent parties? If you pretend a product (or a feature) that doesn't exist exists, then at the very least a competitor is unfairly harmed.

If a site like Reddit gets started by creating nonexistent or sock-puppet users, for instance, that's hardly on the same level as falsifying medical tests "just until we get the bugs sorted out."

The conviction here was defrauding investors, not defrauding medical tests.

If Reddit included those sock-puppet users in their metrics to investors, then that would be roughly equivalent fraud.

Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty

#656

Post by toyg »

necovek wrote: post #603
starfallg wrote: post #579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, negligence would be that something else. Theranos had a duty of care to the patients and they very blatantly breached that duty. Fraud deals with purely financial loss, while negligence deals with harm which is much wider in scope.

I am neither American nor a native English speaker, but I always thought fraud was mostly a deliberate action, and negligence was mostly resulting out of either lack of action or accidental consequences of an action. So if a company deliberately and knowingly markets a "sepsis-test" that puts out completely random results and leads to people getting their limbs amputated (bear with me, I know the example is terrible)…

Negligence is not an absolute concept, there is a scale going from accidental to willful - which is where it borders on fraud. The legal definitions around these terms are complex, because the difference between gross negligence, willful misconduct, and outright fraud, can often be philosophical more than practical. In your example, I reckon that the random tests would be considered willfully negligent.

Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty

#657

Post by aqme28 »

nikanj wrote: post #597
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Skilling of Enron fame got 24 years and was released after 12. That's because his original 24 year sentence was reduced to 14 after a Supreme Court case vacated part of his convictions. My bet, based on some calculators I've seen, is that Holmes serves (actually in jail) 14-18 years.

My bet, based on her net worth, is that she'll die of old age before the last round of appeals ends - and serve zero days before that.

Does she still have any significant net worth? It's not like her stock is still worth anything.

Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty

#658

Post by tialaramex »

nikanj wrote: post #594
runeks wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This disgusts me. The president should not have the power to free anyone from prison. If the laws are broken then (attempt to) change those, but otherwise you’re just saying “yeah, you’re guilty, but I like you so you don’t need to serve your time like everyone else”.

I believe it was originally designed to be a safety valve in the system. A person can be found guilty because the laws are blind, but if a (loud) majority of the population thinks it was a misjustice, the president can fix the situation. I don't think any of the founding fathers foresaw presidents using their power to pardon their friends. The whole system is extremely vulnerable to an insider attack - very few tools…

It's a power Kings have. "The Royal Prerogative of Mercy". That's why the President has it, there weren't a lot of other examples for the Executive to be modelled on. However of course in modern constitutional monarchies the King doesn't operate this power any more, for example Liz's pardon power is operated by her government and ordinarily via some dusty committee looking into injustices (the government occasionally has used it directly e.g. some guy years into his life sentence for murder tackled a terrorist who was stabbing people at an event in London, the Pardon power was used to reduce his sentence in recognition of this bravery)

The US President should have handed this power over to a similarly dusty committee resolving real injustice years ago. This would be less corrupting and more effective because a President is busy whereas the committee would be doing nothing else except investigating the circumstances of potential injustice and choosing how to resolve them (new trial, pardon, etc.)

Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty

#659

Post by streblo »

petilon wrote: post #171
CamperBob2 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fake it all you want until your fakery harms innocent parties.

What's an example of a fakery that doesn't harm innocent parties? If you pretend a product (or a feature) that doesn't exist exists, then at the very least a competitor is unfairly harmed.

In the legal sense, competition doesn’t qualify as an innocent party.

Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty

#660

Post by dragonwriter »

starfallg wrote: post #579
Someone wrote: post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FTA: “This case was specifically about what Holmes told Theranos investors, although her lies also impacted partners and patients.“ If that’s true, it isn’t surprising she wasn’t found guilty for defrauding patients, and more cases (¿maybe one focusing on partners and one focusing on patients?) could follow. I don’t know whether something like that is in the pipeline. Edit: reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliza…

Yes, negligence would be that something else. Theranos had a duty of care to the patients and they very blatantly breached that duty. Fraud deals with purely financial loss, while negligence deals with harm which is much wider in scope.

> Fraud deals with purely financial loss

False. Fraud deals with any time in which something of value (not just something financial) is obtained under false pretenses, and (where civil damages or criminal restitution is sought/awarded for it) can address all compensable harms resulting from the misrepresentation, not just loss that was financial in character (the restitution will be financial, of course, but that's also true of negligence.)

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