Edit to clarify: My statement is more intended to emphasize how overly punishing possession charges rather than to advocate for draconian charges for all offenses.
It seems like this sentence (like many others in our judicial system) is based more on retribution than anything else.
Furthermore, enhancing someone's sentence to scare the next person is not justice. That's sacrificial and gross.
Oh yes she does. You think she's going to be happy at a menial job? No, she'll be right back with a new con the moment she's back on the street. Only now her name recognition will make the con harder.
Offenders who committed a crime of dishonesty had the highest reconviction rate (45.6%)
https://www.lawscot.org.uk/news-and-events/legal-news/reconv...
Though I suppose I personally would prefer the prison time first and the billionaire thing after (like in Chekhov's "The Bet"). In any case, I'm sure that there's a big fraction of humanity who would jump at the chance.
I mean, "relatively easy" doesn't mean it's a cake walk, especially since in the US many State systems are barbarically abusive. She will be in prison with an extremely regimented schedule, being told exactly what to do.
Correct, she's probably not going to need to join a gang for protection, but it is still nearly 10 years in lockup assuming she gets maximum good behavior credits.
What cryptopunk sucker for love wouldn’t jump at the opportunity to help get her a phone? It simply isn’t that far fetched.
what does "legal" have to do with it?
They have "currency" in prison (cigarettes or something), but it's hard to translate your actual money into that currency. Your visitors can't just bring you a whole bunch of cigarettes on visiting day.
These are state and county institutions, not federal. So I can only imagine what's up at the Feds.
That said, you are correct she probably will be going to a fairly cruisy minimum or low security prison. Due to the nature of federal crimes, with a heavy bimodal distribution of severity (i.e., financial/bank/tax fraud... or murdering a judge or during a bank robbery) you can end up in a very gnarly place or a 'Club Fed'. She will get to play volleyball and do watercolouring, maybe even swimming or roller skating, and there may not be a fence, but she's still getting locked in her cell in evenings, will have to do whatever job she's assigned to, will be around at least a few hardened exploitative types and wont be going anywhere for most of a decade at least.
She may not be hardened, but she’s proven to be exploitative. And with her education and experience, is possibly as great a threat to her peers as anyone else with a more violent rap sheet.
It would make a great movie, like a better reprise of "Shot Caller" feat. Nikolaj Coster-Waldau.
https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offen...
Half are in for drugs, one fifth due to Weapons, Explosives, Arson and one in ten because of sex offenses.
So if going down the slightly-less-legal route, the below story was pretty neat. A hacked together prison computer, network attached.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/04/inmates-built-co...
I imagine the web surfing they can do is fairly limited, but I didn't ask.
I also found out that you can buy anything in prison, including a cell phone, or drugs. Ratting out the people who actually sell the stuff is a great way to get yourself killed.
Conveniently:
Vice President (at the time) Biden, knew Elizabeth and even visited Theranos.
Elizabeth Holmes held fundraisers for Hillary Clinton with Chelsea Clinton.
Just recently, a prominent Democrat Senator was asking for leniency on her sentencing.
I would be supremely surprised if she is not pardoned before the end of Biden's term(s).
The only way I see him pardoning her is if he loses the 2024 election and has some sort of fall out with the Democratic party that causes him to go scorched earth, and I don't both of those happening.
"President pardons Elizabeth Holmes" and "President pardons Sholam Weiss" are very different headlines.
Only one of those will draw public outrage, despite the fact that Elizabeth Holmes was sentences to 11 years and Weiss was sentenced to 845 years. I'm fairly certain that no one would care about the second headline because Trump pardoned Weiss a few years ago and no one said shit.
The average time served for murder in the US is about 13 years - just a bit longer than Holmes’ sentence.
Checks out.
It's pretty insane to me still spending a year in prison for possession. Since I come from a country where possession has always be decriminalized, just thinking that some of my behavior could land me in jail is mind bending.
> "The only reason that he plead guilty is because the culture in office and it threatened Mr. Wilson with mandatory sentences that were more than 10 years," said Descano.
Kalief Browder was imprisoned for three years without trial on the accusation that he stole a backpack[2]. After three years, a judge told him he could plead guilty and walk free, or go to trial and risk being imprisoned for 15 years.
I get the feeling authorities lie a lot to get someone to plead guilty. It seems like over 90% of cases in the U.S. end in a plea deal. Everyone agrees that threatening to break someone's leg to force a confession is a gross violation of justice, but somehow it's fine to threaten to take away decades of their life to force them to confess.
[1] https://www.fox5dc.com/news/dc-firefighter-to-be-released-fr... [2] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/06/before-the-law
That Kalief Browder case you linked is a travesty of justice. 3 years before trial is absurd.
Neither of these are federal cases.
Poor people cannot afford to defend themselves, so they make easy targets for incarceration.
Wealthy or connected people take much more time and effort to imprison, so the risk vs reward for prosecutors is just not worth it in most cases. You have to _really_ piss off or embarrass a lot of powerful people to get taken down like this current case.
Source? I checked wikipedia and it suggests that it was the other way around. The article on war on drugs also doesn't show much developments around the 80s. Most of the changes were in the 70s.
I can’t speak to the private prison stuff, but having grown up in the 80s in the US, I can tell you that the Wikipedia article is not complete for the 80s.
There was an enormous anti drug push at the time, culminating in 1989. It was everywhere in the culture that I experienced. Maybe a backlash to the popularity of cocaine at the time, I don’t know.
We even had video games displaying “say no to drugs” in attract mode
>There was an enormous anti drug push at the time, culminating in 1989. It was everywhere in the culture that I experienced. Maybe a backlash to the popularity of cocaine at the time, I don’t know.
Maybe that's just biased by your memories? If you came of age in the 80s, you're obviously not going to remember all the anti-drug/tough on crime stuff that happened in the 70s. Note that just because that there weren't many developments in the 80s, doesn't mean that they weren't doing anti-drug programs in your school. It just means that the relevant policies were already enacted.
The wikipedia article for "tough on crime" also shows a similar timeline. Crime became a political issue well before the 80s.
As far as I know, none of the first ladies from Nixon, Ford, or Carter were on TV regularly talking about drugs.
Edit - added: The Clinton years saw even greater rate of increase in prison population, and for most of the same reasons.
"Reagan's presidency marked the start of a long period of skyrocketing rates of incarceration, largely thanks to his unprecedented expansion of the drug war. The number of people behind bars for nonviolent drug law violations increased from 50,000 in 1980 to more than 400,000 by 1997."
Indeed the "drug war" began before the private prison industry, but it has directly and indirectly influenced drug policy to protect and expand its business. https://justicepolicy.org/research/gaming-the-system-how-the...
We fail to reflect that 11 years in prison is a really long and miserable time.
I think a bunch of different kinds of federal crimes (like major drug crimes) will also port their accompanying murder charges to federal court.
Yes, but the general federal murder law (18 USC § 1111) only applies in the “special maritime and territorial jurisdiction of the United States”.
A lot of federal felonies have, in place of a general federal felony murder rule, a distinct crime or enhanced punishment when death is involved and deliberately killing certain federal officials is also a federal crime.
Especially if it's perpetrated with a car.
"Holmes was acquitted on three charges relating to patients who received inaccurate test results but found guilty on four charges, including one count of conspiracy to defraud investors and three counts of wire fraud against investors."
A typical median families income was approx. $70k in 2021. That covers multiple people, and in general across the US is enough to pay for housing, schooling, medical care, etc.
A lifetime of that (inflation adjusted) is usually enough for someone to retire somewhere.
If you take the 48 years from 18 to social security retirement age of 66, that would make a median lifetimes earnings $3,360,000 in 2021 dollars.
Holmes got nearly $1bln from investors in the Theranos mess, which is 297 lifetimes worth of median earnings, which considering that directly maps to someone (or multiple someones) working hard for that time, can be consider ‘life’s works’.
She was convicted of fraud on at least $140 million of wire transfers out of that, or ‘only’ 41 life’s works.
While 11 years is a long time, the destruction of value done is nothing to scoff at.
With decent leadership, 300 people working for their entire lives could accomplish a lot of great things.
Of course, it could also be blown on crypto scams and lambos. It’s not a perfect comparison.
However, there's a consideration - if I somehow steal $1m from Elon, it materially doesn't affect him that much at all. But if I steal $5k from a McDonald's employee, it could ruin them.
“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal loaves of bread.” -Anatole France
She didn't incinerate the money, she spent it, it went somewhere else. It went to workers and other companies.
Now maybe that money could have been spent to commission 300 workers to make great things. Maybe it would have gone to pump up the S&P 500 or some shitcoin.
The problem is that she used false pretexts to get and spend the money.
It’s what it was directed to accomplish, and if that activity produced something of equivalent value (or more) on it’s journey to that state, or dissipated into heat and noise.
Near as I can tell, Theranos was at least 99% heat and noise.
Or in other words, if a rich person is defrauded and they still have enough money to live a life of lavish luxury, was a crime still committed?
Penalties for misrepresenting your company help ensure that society devotes resources towards actually good ideas.
> Penalties for misrepresenting your company help ensure that society devotes resources towards actually good ideas.
I agree with this in theory but I think fines and a ban from working in certain industries or founding companies is probably enough, not a decade in prison.
I don't think it was common knowledge that theranos was a scam in the medical industry until relatively late.
Near as I can tell, a decade is light
Where did the money go? Has any been recovered?
Seriously, read Bad Blood, see what she tried to do to Tyler Schultz, Erika Cheung, and Rochelle Gibbons (the widow of the Theranos scientist that committed suicide), among many others. The best analogy I can think of is Lance Armstrong's fraud. Yes, his cheating and lying about it was bad, but I guess at least somewhat understandable given the culture of cycling at the time. But the reason I despise the man is due to his mafioso tactics of intimidation he used to silence people. Holmes did the exact same.
But on the other side, what are the incentives (to future criminals) to try pull off fraud of this magnitude. There's obviously various psychological effects playing out here (as well as circumstantial ones, great idea goes pear-shaped but it's seemingly too late to pull-out due to ego/sunkcost/other fallacies/last minute save).
But has anyone attempted a game-theoretic payoff matrix, I'm just wondering in the wider scheme of things (to loop back in the post I'm replying to about 11years feeling light) will this kind of sentence actually deter any future similar cases from happening or are the payoff's (financial or otherwise) just too high for this to apply any real deterrent threat to those who are likely to be in the position to be influenced by it?
So in reality, actually this is just really a punishment?
That is to say, there is no quantitative to compare harm from billions of fraud to getting kids hooked on crack.
The relevant question is does the punishment fit the crime.
How the punishment stacks up against other crimes and punishments doesn't matter.
They gave her a sentence that's a little below the federal sentencing guidelines but not by a huge amount.
It would be good to stop pushing this kind of misinformation (yeah I know war on drug bad)
Aka don't mess with rich people.
Same with SBF.
Just garnish their income for life or until they make their victims whole.
Wasn't she trying to raise money for a start-up while on trial?
> Same with SBF
Isn't he trying to raise money right now?
Also their activity would be watched closely and income garnished.
But there is still deterrence purpose of punishment - if you remove prison from considerations, it significantly changes risk calculations for white collar crime making it much more profitable.