Is the latter just easier to prosecute because of the paper trail? Or is the law biased more towards punishing financial crimes?
I keep seeing a lot of "throw them in jail" posts here on HN and it's bad. It should be very hard for the state to jail someone. It should require extremely solid proof that they committed a crime which was defined in law. If we lose that principle, we revert from rule of law to rule of judges and mob rule. Some people like Holmes don't get punished in a way that satisfies everyone they hurt, and people like SBF might never get punished, and that's fine because lowering the burden of proof would only result in more injustice.
I think it's more nuanced than that. Even if the prosecutors had mountains of evidence of harm to patients, defense attorneys have a lot of experience casting doubt on that kind of evidence making trail very tricky. My wife works in the medical/legal overlap and constantly sees stuff like "yes the patient spent 30 years working in an asbestos plant next to an industrial incinerator, but they smoked a cigarette once in the bathroom in high school so you can't say their cancer came from any one cause". And sometimes juries buy it.
But when you accumulate mountains of evidence that basically says "yeah, we know our stuff doesn't work...fake it till you make it, yo", you've got counterarguments like "we were just kidding" and "it's all fake" that isn't as resonate with the jury. So, the prosecution goes with the high-confidence charges.