Theranos’ Holmes May Pursue ‘Mental Disease’ in Her Defense | Hacker News Reader

Theranos’ Holmes May Pursue ‘Mental Disease’ in Her Defense

bloomberg.com

32 pointspseudolus26 comments

I was thinking of Theranos a few weeks ago. And what role they would’ve played in the pandemic had they not been outed.

They likely would’ve released a fake test and gotten a lot of people killed.

Hope she gets her appropriate punishment.

I almost applied for a job there and was willing to move my family to the Bay Area to work on something that meaningful. So glad I dodged the bullet.

I was working on a blood test startup when Theranos imploded. We spoke with a number of their top people about working with us. The truth was that while some of the Theranos team had valuable skills/connections (e.g. getting the devices deployed into retail), the entire saga had tainted their reputations and made it so difficult to raise capital for a legit device (we did two tests while Theranos claimed to do over 200 tests) to the point we couldn’t engage with any of them.

That’s a similar response to accounting personal who worked for Arthur Anderson, the one I know personally leaves a hole in his resume during the tenure and would explain it if asked. He said it was a pretty common tactic, even for those that had no roll with Enron.

That's sad. But expected. I wondered "would I have tainted myself forever" – and it sounds like it would've tainted me.

I bet working at Facebook will have similar questions to be answered.

Holmes claims to have confirmed her diagnosis with an Edison machine and a microscopic sampling of blood.

Ha! Truly the only evidence we'll ever get.

> Davila also ruled, over Holmes’s objections, that the examination of the former CEO will be videotaped. Holmes’s lawyers argued the recording would “negatively affect the tenor or the interview,” according to the ruling.

Or accurately reflect the false "tenor" she speaks with. Sorry, I had to say it.

if she had never been caught Theranos would probably be a public company by now trading at a $50B valuation off of covid testing hopes given the frothiness of this market and the money being thrown at diagnostics.

What would the concrete mental illness be?

Affluenza?

This, and the fawning over of the VC community and tech press. Everybody involved was caught up in their own vapours.

The article hints at it:

> [Mindy] Mechanic is an expert on the psychosocial consequences of trauma, with a focus on violence against women, and often provides expert testimony in cases involving “interpersonal violence,” according to her faculty profile on the school’s website.

It looks like she's going to blame it all on her cofounder, who was also her boyfriend.

They must be running low on good defensive options. As a non-expert, it kind of looks like the only mental disease she could possibly claim would be some variant of sociopathy, and I don’t think sociopaths get to use their disease as an excuse during criminal trials.

It could also just be decent lawyers throwing everything they can hoping some will stick

That's essentially the same point the parent is making.

If they had a clear, viable strategy they wouldn't be playing the twinkie defense or trying anything that might work.

And to be clear, I don’t blame her lawyers for doing this. It’s their job to zealously defend her, as distasteful as I find her behavior to have been, and the defense is what the defense must be.

But yeah, they must not have much else available if they’re going for the insanity plea.

Is it just me or does she look like a female Mark Zuckerberg?

her intention was to be more like Steve Jobs

Is 'affluenza' an affirmative defense?

Yes, it’s been tried before. Ethan Couch[0] used it to get a low sentence after driving drunk, killing four people and injuring nine quite greviously. The basic argument was that he wasn’t given any feedback as a child, and needed rehabilitation, and managed to get him put into rehab and 10 years probation.

Given that he was re arrested two years later for drinking and violating probation, it doesn’t seem like the rehab worked.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethan_Couch

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