Theranos Criminal Case Is Broader Than Publicly Disclosed, Prosecutors Say
bloomberg.com
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I hope they don't just give them some fine. Makes the judicial system look bad.
(Relatively few people are at this point in jail for smoking pot, for whatever that's worth to you).
Arrest rates are way higher though.
Pre-trial detention is a thing too, of course. They can afford bail, but many innocent people who literally did not do the crime they're accused of still sit in jail for months/years waiting for a trial.
I think directionally most people on HN already agree with you about cash bail. I certainly believe it should be done away with.
https://i.imgur.com/whWAVs3.jpg
The strong majority of all prisoners are in for violent crime and property crime. Public order offenses (which includes eg weapons and DUIs) are nearly as large as all drug offenses.
There are about 60% as many people in state prisons for just burglary, as all drug offenses.
In 2015, only 3.4% of people in state prisons were in for drug possesion of any type. Marijuana would be a small subset of that figure.
It's not. It might seem to be the case to you, me, and others with some understanding of the legal system in the United States, but when we consider the background knowledge of the legal system required to understand how cases are adjudicated, this is objectively quite generally not obvious.
> (Relatively few people are at this point in jail for smoking pot, for whatever that's worth to you).
Compared to what? If Virginia is any indication of trends among non-decriminalized or non-legalized states, it's relatively high. (I'm nitpicking, of course: there's a substantial difference between jail and prison; I'm assuming your definition—innocently, mind you—does not distinguish between the two.) https://ww.google.com/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/n...
What's obvious is that a complicated white-collar fraud case is harder to prosecute than a trivial drug possession case. You don't need to know anything about the criminal justice system to grasp that.
Please. One day this system will collapse on itself.
The poor have a shitty public defender who advises them to plead guilty even if they aren't, and if they committed a crime it's likely something simple and straightforward to explain and prove.
The clock has run out, but my lawyer advises against against asking for damages. Looking at the law, it should be a slam-dunk deal, but apparently the district judge is sufficiently corrupt not to be trusted.
It's not my job to school the landlord to be honest, and since there are no consequences for bad behaviour they will be dishonest and will continue to cheat students and other out-of-towners out of what is rightfully theirs. That, friends, is the reality in the US: groups of the population have good reason to believe that the legal system is not working for them.
Recently, a political TV program commented on the Brazilian election - on one side is a fascist, on the other a representative of party so corrupt that it's unelectable. The situation is approaching a civil war. In the US it's not quite as bad as in Brazil, but it's getting there.
The case itself, hit or miss, but 50% > 0%.
My big lesson from taking landlords to court is that the security deposit is a negotiation.
How much are you willing to bet? The demand letter is in the mail, if the money doesn't show up next Friday the matter will end up at the qadi's.
Landlords expect you to come at them for the deposit. If you don't, it's a 13th month rent. The serious renters just treat the deposit as their 12th month rent, but if you didn't do that, or care about your reference, you sue for it.
IANAL let alone your L, but at this point, in my 42nd year of life, if I don't get my security deposit back, I drop a buck fifty and put a suit in process, fully expecting the landlord to whine at me and then start the actual negotiation.
I've rented in 5 cities across the US. I have never once had to even ask for my security deposit to be returned. It's just assumed that I would get it back, and I do.
In the cities where I've lived, I've never heard of anyone not getting their security deposit back. I honestly had no idea we were so lucky!
As has been pointed out the more complex the crime the more time and money it takes to prove. Generally wealthier people can commit financial crimes that the poor can not.
Holmes settled the civil case with the SEC I believe so she’s cleared there. She absolutely could be jailed for a long time, but the wheels of justice turn slowly.
The wheels of justice turns slow if you have money.
It is not a punitive measure. Innocent until proven guilty, etc.
So while it's fair to criticise the disparate abilities to post bail, changing the system to incarcerate more rich accused would just be compounding injustice.
https://www.cps.gov.uk/legal-guidance/bail
Charging an arm and a leg to receive bail doesn't seem like it's serving any useful purpose?
Identifying a "direct cause" of the 2007-2009 financial crisis, with certainty exceeding 90-95% (the "reasonable doubt" threshold) would be worthy of a Nobel Memorial Prize, in my estimation.
b) the senior executives at institutions like bear stearns who signed off on creating the mortgage backed securities and their known composition of shit mortgages.
c) the senior executives at the rating agencies who knowingly rated shit bonds as AAA.
d) senior executives at institutions like Countrywide which pumped the shit mortgages into the market.
In other words, bond ratings may not be the cause, but still be a cause.
If I sell you a crappy asset (imagine a company almost going bankrupt) for $10m and you don't do proper due diligence on said asset, then you have no right of complaining afterwards. No one is going to do your homework.
If you know it is a crappy product, and don;t warn me, it is at the very least a SEC violation, punishable. Could also be viewed as fraud, and pursued as a crime.
They knew through sheer logic that one of these positions was by deduction not tenable.
But they went for it anyway, collecting commissions on both sides.
Even the Enron case, which was a pretty clear case of fraud, took the government 5 years to build a case and win in court.
So, while all of those things you mention do indeed sound bad, they are incredibly difficult to prove in a criminal trial.
I can knowingly sell you a crappy car, and if you sign an agreement that you bought and accepted the good in its current state, that's that. Yes, I acted unethically, but I didn't defraud you.
Second, a successful prosecution requires proof beyond a reasonable doubt that a specific person performed each element of specific crimes. Defendants do not need to even present a defense--and in fact sometimes do not, relying entirely on poking holes in the government's case.
Now that's obviously not a terribly smart idea. But there's simply no way to blame any single individual when none of them had the power to the system by themselves. I mean: quite obviously the companies being rated would have loved for others to bear the costs for it.
https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=wor...
the dotcom 1.0 crash had a lot of irrational exuberance, where VC money was raised and pissed away for ideas that wouldn't work at the time (beenz, flooz, pets.com, webvan, etc). Then there was the outright fraud like Enron and Worldcom.
How is that comparable? Holder even stated, "I am concerned that the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult to prosecute them" because it might damage the economy. That is not an aspect the AG should be considering. They should be upholding the rule of law which did not occur after the 2008 crisis
Right after that, the questioning continues:
> Grassley: Do you believe that the investment bankers that were repackaging bad mortgages that were AAA-rated are guilty of fraud or is it a case of just not being aggressive or effective enough to prove that they did something fraudulent and criminal?
> Holder: We looked at those kinds of cases. I think we have been appropriately aggressive, these are not always easy cases to make. When you look at these cases, you see that things were done ‘wrong’ then the question is whether or not they were illegal. And I think the people in our criminal division… I think have been as aggressive as they could be, brought cases where we think we could have brought them. I know that in some instances that has not been a satisfying answer to people, but we have been as aggressive as we could have been.
He also says:
> Holder: You are right, senator. The greatest deterrent effect is not to prosecute a corporation — although that’s important — the greatest deterrent effect is to prosecute the individuals in the corporations that are responsible for those decisions.
He's saying the opposite of what you're claiming he said: that he tried to prosecute the "bankers" as aggressively as he could, but the cases were "not easy to make."
How do you figure? Smells like a p value taken from a science class, not anything related to a legal definition of reasonable doubt.
There are organizations, financial institutions, executives, investors, businesses, etc. that did not deserve jail, but did deserve to lose financially.
Instead, some lost their sort and others were shielded with $100,000,000,000s of taxpayer money.
The kinds of people that supported this flagrant graft are despicable. Probably not jailable (I mean most politicians and even the president supported bailing out asset holders), but more despicable than Zuckerberg or most of the scapegoats you see in the news.
there is fairly strong evidence that repeal of the glass-steagall act was a contributing factor to the environment that allowed investment/securities firms to get out of control in the 2001-2008 time period:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aftermath_of_the_repeal_of_the...
Although, maybe you were joking?
Moreover (and probably more important) is that the parties involved except the govt all had plausible deniability in that they could point to the other parties to deflect blame. I say "except the govt" because they were the ones who were pushing the banks to lower loan standards for minorities, backing the GSE's with explicit loan guarantees and encouraging home ownership as the essence of the American dream to minorities. The mechanics or mistakes of how it was done, with CDO's or inflated credit ratings or even fraud, were a consequence of the govt pressure applied. Also, this was not an explicit policy written into regs & etc. but an implicit policy imposed by threats or hints by agencies that had a lot of power over the banking, mortgage and credit markets they regulate.
What I am curious about is whether Holmes will in the end have made any money with Theranos. She should lose everything and then some more but I suspect she will still end up with a few million in the bank or in houses.
They used central lab with conventional test equipment to consolidate and process patient samples (not their magic lab on the bench device) and issue the results. The problem was that their central lab(s) was run poorly (multiple violations) so the results were questioned. (Similar to lets say a bread factory making bread, then the inspector comes in and finds out that certain fridges used for yeast storage were out of spec by 5 degrees, no batch log files etc. and shuts down the factory. The bread that was produced at such factory was definitely not "fake").
I believe its a case of completely incompetent leadership that ultimately snowballed into MUCH bigger issues (what else to expect from a 19 year old girl with no experience running a company in one of the hardest/most complicated and most heavily regulated industries?)!
NB: Not defending Holmes or Balwani but curious about the legal status of the case.
Grand juries are often used for a single charge, but can also be used to supervise a lengthy investigation with multiple charges and multiple defendants (like the ones used by Robert Mueller in his investigations of Russian election interference).
(https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/superseding-indictment-boyd-m...)