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Comment by bmitc | Hacker News Reader

What bothers me about the lenient sentencing is because of my assumption of how easy it will be to get out even earlier due to “good behavior”. She’ll probably get out somewhere between 3-8 years in. This is probably also why she has had two pregnancies while awaiting sentencing. One was probably to try and get a reduced sentence, and the other is to have a reason to be let out early. I understand she is nearing 40, but I personally find it irresponsible to have kids literally right before you go to prison.

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No: if she doesn't e.g. abuse phones or get into dumb fights with inmates, she'll get 54 days off per year in good time. That's it; that's what you get in the federal system. There is no parole. She didn't get a reduced sentence; she got a sentence that was higher than the PSR.

Ah, I didn’t realize that about federal prison sentences. Thanks for the correction. I still think she deserves every bit of the sentence though.

To my knowledge, she has never even shown remorse or admitted to her crimes. Even her pre-sentencing statement showed no accountability or responsibility for her actions. She continues to paint Theranos as just a failed startup.

The points I'm making here are positive, not normative.

I imagine there's some calculus to be done here.

The impact of a mea culpa on sentencing would likely be minimal in the grand scheme of things. I think (for one) she's pathological - as I pointed out in another comment you'd have to be to screw over people like Henry Kissinger and four star Marine Corp general James Mattis who's nickname is actually "Mad Dog". Scary.

Secondly, her post-prison career opportunities are much better if she goes to her grave never admitting or acknowledging any fault or wrongdoing. She still has plenty of fans and true believers. I was interviewing an attorney (of all things) once and she said "All Elizabeth Holmes did was the same thing men do and get away with everyday". Needless to say I didn't hire her.

I don't know if there are any "Son of Sam" laws that apply here but I can definitely see her having a very prosperous career at 50 hitting the speaking circuit, book deal, podcast, whatever capitalizing in 2033 would look like.

This is a tangent, but...does she deserve every bit of 11 years?

I agree that relative to other sentences she does, but what does 11 years mean to you? It's everything to me. I cannot imagine giving up 11 years.

I think we throw around years like slaps on the wrist.

It is indeed a long time and a fair thing to bring up. Without getting into a philosophical discussion about sentences in general though, I think it's fair to point out that she ran a fraudulent company for well over 11 years, benefiting personally and financially from it all, while knowingly doing so, lying, and whatever else. She fired an employee who tried to warn fairly early about her lies, who later committed suicide. She hired investigators to follow Tyler Shultz around and bullied him with lawsuits.

These and more actions of hers do make me personally feel okay with her sentencing, especially since she shows zero remorse. Her final words before sentencing were basically "I'm sorry I ran a failed startup".

Yes, but at the same time, she defrauded her investors for billions, and, as was pointed out elsewhere in this discussion, appears to be completely and totally unrepentant. Her position is that Theranos was just a failed startup and that, essentially, she's being punished because she ran out of runway. Whereas, in reality, Theranos didn't work, and, according to its own scientists, could never have worked. It was snake oil from beginning to end.

I don't think 11 years is an unjust sentence for that.

She earns the 11 years through the damage caused to people who used her fraudulent product.

Investors losing their skin? That's all risk/reward. They took big risk for big reward but lost.

First part ok, second part wtf

She wasn’t prosecuted for that though.

> Investors losing their skin? That's all risk/reward. They took big risk for big reward but lost.

No, it's not OK and it's not all risk/reward. The risk is whether the product can succeed and be better than others' products/services - not whether the company you're investing in is a fraud - that's what the legal system tries to prevent.

Here’s what confuses me about this. The entire SV culture is have an idea, build a prototype, demo it (whether it works or is just a UI doesn’t not matter because you want to validate the product). Then get capital and go all in on making it work. Now this being a medtech product with heavy research, I am not surprised many things were not working and more engineering/scientist hours were needed. I don’t think she was intentionally trying to defraud anyone, I do believe she ran out of runway before her breakthrough and because no more VC capital was available there was not a clear path forward and people lost faith in her. I mean what was the endgame? So be in research mode forever?

Obviously I don’t condone her unhinged behavior of stalking and threatening whistleblowers, but that should not all amount to 11 years. It will absolutely make any similar startup too risky and they will not find any capital.

You can't defraud people while you seek the end of your RnD journey. In order to finance this search, she committed fraud and completely misrepresented the state of her efforts. Based on her lies, people gave her money to continue her development efforts. There is no excuse for this.

> I don’t think she was intentionally trying to defraud anyone

we very much disagree here.

I'm not a lawyer, but I'm pretty sure this is not nearly as gray an area as you think. Have you ever read an IPO prospectus or a quarterly report from a publicly traded company? They include big lists of risks that can all threaten the performance of the company. Those are there because you have to be truthful with your investors. If you lie to raise money, that's fraud. If it doesn't actually already work and you tell them it does, it's a problem.

What I think in this case is that it's a pity that she wasn't prosecuted for threatening people's health with unreliable test results. They didn't "run out of runway" while in research mode: they were already selling a defective product that is safety-critical. Google Jean-Louis Gasse's piece on his personal experience with Theranos results. It was incredibly callous to gamble with people's lives that way. I do understand that it was easier to prosecute the financial crimes, but it's still unsatisfying that they were not held to account on those actions.

You have never been able to outright lie to your investors and nobody faces the risk of following in Elizabeth's footsteps save for those who faced with a losing technology choose to simply lie to their users and investors. You are as much at risk of meeting that fate as you are "risk" of finding yourself in a bank with a gun and a ski mask. If you find yourself outside the bank loading your gun then simply remove the ski mask, place the gun in your glove compartment, and go home.

In medicine you are indeed expected to stay in research mode forever until you have something that provably works. None of this is controversial or complicated.

The investors angle, especially the very early ones, still puzzle me. My only experience with medical labs comes from family. Back the day, when Theranos was hottest thing under the sun, I asked my mom, medical lab tech, about it. Her answer was, I paraphrase, "no way, you need way bigger blood samples for one of the tests if you want proper results". Followed something along the lines of who is providing oversight of the labs and making test equipement is properly callibarted. In Germany, local authoroties do just that.

So, I always wondered, if a lab technician needs a mere glance on the sales pitch to have doubts, how could investors miss it during even the most superficial due dilligence? Or did they catch it, and just say fuck it, we can still dump it through an IPO?

And those celebrities going on its board, was the money so good and the hype so blinding?

In the US there are also authorities making sure (especially medical) machines are in good order. Perhaps the investors trusted the authorities?

they had some big issues with their labs compliance if i remember correctly

It's far too little.

I can't get too upset about the investors; they had the opportunity to do their own due diligence and chose not too.

She lied to patients, subverting systems meant to protect people against fraudulent medical care and faking blood test results. This wasn't a game. The punishment for cavalierly toying with people's health was far too lenient.

She earned 25 years or more not just on the merits, but as an example to the next person who decides to make money with fake medical treatments.

> I think we throw around years like slaps on the wrist.

I generally agree, but when your fraud is in the hundreds of millions and billions range, well, that's more than most people will earn in a hundred lifetimes.

I think to me it depends very much on who is losing the money. If you defraud Musk of 1B of his money, that represents less than 1/100th of his wealth and is completely irrelevant.

If you defraud 500K people of all their $2K in savings, then you deserve everything that’s coming to you.

Oddly enough I think the justice system is set up to function the other way around.

What makes it set up to function the other way round?

As long as we're locking up druggies who never hurt anybody but themselves for that long, we should be doing the same thing to frauds like her.

my concern is that things like this only get prosecuted hard when the victims are themselves filthy rich. I suppose we'll see what happens with sbf...

We’re not: https://www.city-journal.org/myth-of-the-nonviolent-drug-off...

> After President Biden pardoned Americans convicted of federal marijuana possession last week, reform advocates praised his action as a “historic” step away from mass incarceration, while critics lamented it as another blow to public safety. The truth is somewhat less momentous: the pardons affect only about 6,500 people, none of whom is currently in prison

Why do two wrongs make a right here?

Because if you don't hold rich people accountable to the same laws as poor people then nothing will ever change.

So if she was poor you'd prefer she got a more lenient sentence?

Yes

I have friends that have faced longer prison sentences for a couple bags of weed in their backpacks. she, her lawyers, and her “previous trauma” get no sympathy from me.

The sentence for your friends was excessive, cruel and unfair. That doesn't stop the fact that 9 years (counting maximum 500 days reduction for good behavior) is a very long time.

I know someone who went to prison 25 years for selling drugs out of a brick and mortar store. He clearly sold a lot. But I don’t understand how sentencing for that is fair in comparison to Elizabeth. Feels like Elizabeth did waaay more damage for way longer. Guess just better lawyers?

Why the sympathy for these white collar criminals that have ruined lives in numbers comparable to crimes that we lock other people up for decades for committing?

In general, I'm not convinced in long sentences, I don't believe they deter crime nor do I believe they help criminals become productive members of society especially given the current state of prisons in most countries. I think that locking up people for decades should only be considered when there's a very real risk of major crime (murder, sexual assault, etc.. ) if the criminal is released. So the sympathy on my part is not only for white collar criminals, it's for the imprisoned.

Wow, that's truly insane.

What state?

Can you imagine giving up your life because your blood test results were completely wrong?

If you knew that they were wrong, and you still recommended others to make life-or-death decisions based on them?

Yes. For corporate murder.

She sold fraudulent medical tests that were widely deployed and people made medical decisions based on those fraudulent tests. For instance in AZ alone this effected 175,940 consumers.

https://fortune.com/2022/01/04/theranos-elizabeth-holmes-hum...

Statistically some of those consumers suffered worse outcomes and others died although the link between those outcomes and Theranos is hard to prove in the individual cases. If you throw bricks off of a skyscraper at the street below without looking you are trying to kill "people" even if you never saw any of your eventual victims. She is being punished for the financial aspect of the affair according to those standards but we shouldn't forget the other aspect.

If she was given one day for each person she defrauded of their health not their money she would be in prison for life which to my thinking is equitable. I have no sympathy for her whatsoever. 11 years isn't even enough.

> I agree that relative to other sentences she does, but what does 11 years mean to you? It's everything to me. I cannot imagine giving up 11 years.

Then don't commit one of the most notable frauds of the 21st century? It seems to me that avoiding this fate you so rightfully fear is incredibly simple and anybody who therefore fails to restrain themselves from doing so has earned every second of their sentence.

"To my knowledge, she has never even shown remorse or admitted to her crimes."

I wouldn't be surprised if her pregnancies were calculated to try to gain leniency. Otherwise it's pretty selfish to have kids knowing you could be in prison for most of their childhood.

Didn't Shkreli get released significantly earlier than 85% of 7 years?

Yep. He served 4.5 of a 7 year stretch. He got out early by claiming First Step Act ETCs (a new program passed under Trump that gives 1:0.50 day credits for participating in anti-recidivism programs for nonviolent offenders, applicable to moving from full custody to a halfway house).

So, yeah, under the First Step rules, Holmes might see a couple years chopped off that sentence.

I think it's unlikely she serves fewer than 6-7 years. It's a tough sentence!

I was about to mention that - federal prison early release is not some liberal revolving door that's painted in some media outlets. You do your time in federal prison!

Didn’t a lot of prisoners get released because of COVID?

Arguably she could have decided to have children because with her age and the possibility of a 5-20 year sentence that having children may have been impossible had she waited.

I think it's unfair to draw attention to this particular decision that she has made as as callous or scheming when in reality there are already plenty of examples and her having children may have been the most human of them all.

it is not callous to get a child just before an expected years long prison sentence? i'd say that's failing at parenthood from the scratch

I read, like 10-15 posts daily on social media where people mentions that they have decided to postpone parenthood simply because their circumstances aren't favorable (mostly finance related).

When I read about Holmes in light of those posts, I'd say she is some sort of callous and insensitive person. She never once gave a shit about ethics, people's lives etc. Who knows she decided to have kids simply because it might reduce her sentence rather than because she really wanted to have kids like rest of us do.

There are special female sections at some jails esp for woman that is pregnant or has babies - afaik they can stay with the mom until they need to go to school.

Federal prison doesn't have parole, it is a fixed 'good conduct' credit of up to 54 days per year. So she's serving a little more than 9 years minimum.

I’d give 5% odds that someone finagles a presidential pardon for her in a few years.

This is a boring point that people keep making in this thread. If that's actually the case, then none of this discussion matters. If this discussion doesn't matter, jumping into it and pointing that isn't making HN any better for curious discussion. Can it.

I honestly find presidential pardons to be fascinating. The whole idea that a single person can completely subvert the justice system without any true checks and balances is really interesting. It reminds me of monarchy, except that if King Charles (say) attempted to use his legal right to step in and stop justice like this, there would be a revolution, yet it's completely fine for a president to do the same thing on a whim.

The presidential pardon is itself a check for the executive branch to use on the judicial branch.

It's an essential part of the system of checks and balances among the three branches of US government - it prevents the judicial branch from getting too much power compared to the executive branch.

In the US it’s woefully abused, though - political cronies are excused their crimes as a quid pro quo in return for silence - it’s appallingly corrupt and unprincipled.

People who are guilty of a crime and prosecuted fairly under the law should generally serve their sentence. Exceptions to that are best managed by an independent and transparent tribunal who can give principled reasons for commuting specific sentences, for example a prisoner serving a very long term has undergone a genuine moral transformation and is now safe to release, or changes in society have rendered prosecutions of a certain time and place anachronistic and unjust be modern standards.

I'd still argue there ought to be a clemency system that is entirely outside the authority of the judicial branch.

Yes, such a system could be (and has been) abused, but given the power the judicial side has (and how that power has be abused) there has to be a system in place that checks the judicial system's power over individuals. This check prevents over-corruption in the judicial system to an extent. The point is to not allow any branch of government to gain too much power - a "separation of powers".

So many people are wrongfully convicted, either because the law is unjust (many drug laws from the 1990s, for example) or because the judicial system itself is so imperfect--from overzealous district attorneys who count their convictions as merit points (independently of the case merits) to the unjust plea bargain system to police investigators who extract false confessions.

The presidential pardon is a holdover from the British royal pardon. It gets abused regularly to help out cronies and family.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_pardoned_or_gra...

Given some presidents have pardoned HUNDREDS of people this would imply there is a serious problem with the US justice system?

Thankfully a US president can exert his king-like authority and correct this judicial problem.

Question - Given the obvious flaws with the justice system how does one get the presidents attention to get a pardon?

Have you ever looked at the people who were pardoned and the crimes they committed?

Armed bank robbery, drugs, fraud, counterfeiting.

> She’ll probably get out somewhere between 3-8 years in.

I don’t know that it’s that irresponsible given that her family is incredibly wealthy and she’ll be gone for a relatively short time in their childhood.

I mean I know it’s going to be unpopular to say but she’s a blonde-haired, pretty white girl from a wealthy family. I’m astounded it was as long as 11 years (really 3-5). I’m sure she is too, and I imagine it’ll be reduced further on appeal once Balwani has been painted as the criminal mastermind of the operation.

We’ll know better once we see what he gets, and what the justification is for that sentence.

You're wrong about the reasons why but you're still right that it's irresponsible to have kids before going to prison.

What reasons am I wrong about?

Parole being part of the calculus

That was only one which was already corrected.

She’s a mid-30s woman looking at a decade in prison. It was either now or never.

That makes a lot of sense, and a lot of what people are saying about her family planning decisions read pretty ghoulish to me.

She has a big, supportive family. Her kids will be fine. People write like the kid is going to be raised in a USP, like Bane from Batman.

Fine’ish. I doubt it’s healty to grow up knowing your mother isn’t there because she’s in prison.

They're going to be taken care of by a big, well-off extended family, as hundreds of generations of children have been prior to the modern invention of the nuclear family (hey, Rayiner, remember all the threads about this?). Then, sometime between 1st and 4th grade, depending on how First Step applies to Holmes, they'll also have their mother at home full time rather than visiting her a couple times a month.

They'll be fine. Lots and lots of kids have it actually hard, because their mom is sent away when they're 5 or 6. Here? No problem. I think she's a sociopath, but her family planning decision makes perfect sense, and the people writing comments about how callous or irresponsible she is are telling on themselves in a particular weird way.

Yeah, good luck to the kid with that kind of mother. No matter how you spin it, the kid will suffer because of the mother.

It is not uncommon for kids to have a father in prison growing up.

Or egg freezing.

Don't be creepy.

Embryo freezing is a miraculous, perfectly viable option for women desiring children, but unable to commit to pregnancy for whatever reason until they are too old. It decouples the embryo viability from the mother's physical age.

My wife was forced down this route when diagnosed with cancer at 35 - the chemo and radiation killed all her eggs and forced her into a mandatory regime of chemically induced menopause. The presence of estrogen in her body is now a life threatening condition for the rest of her life.

We were able to freeze three embryos prior to starting treatment, and are considering surrogacy now.

There is nothing creepy about egg freezing. There is something very creepy about telling a woman that she should freeze her eggs rather than having a kid, because you've decided that's more appropriate.

Nobody said she "should" freeze her eggs, and the fact that you jumped to that assumption is extremely creepy.

Her husband is wealthy, her family is too. I'm sure the child will be fine compared to almost every other child who's parent went to prison. To be honest I think psychological development wise it's probably preferable if the child is 0-6 when their mother goes to prison than let's say 6-12.

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