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Comment by todd3834 | Hacker News Reader

10 years used to feel like a really long time to me. Now that I have two young kids the idea of missing out on 10 years of their life growing up is in the impossible to handle part of my brain. I feel bad for everyone effected and yes even her.

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I have the capacity to feel really bad for her kids. I couldn't care less about the rich investors money she squandered, but as a mother I'm spitting furious that she would bring two children into this world, knowing that she was guilty for the fraud that she stood accused of. She's begged the courts for leniency on behalf of her children, and I really want to believe that she didn't have children for that sole purpose, but I don't.

One the other hand, if she waited until after prison to have children, she might have been to old to have them.

♬ cry me a ri-iver ... ♬

If I were being uncharitable, I'd say she had the kids to try and avoid going to jail. If she were a psychopath it's the sort of thing she might pull. On the other hand it may have been the only opportunity to have kids if she knew she was going to go inside for a while, so she maximised her opportunity.

Doing whatever she wants out of self interest, and damn the consequences to those to who she's responsible for? Story checks out, but that's not much more generous.

It looks like straightforward cost externalization: she achieved reproduction, the consequences of growing up without a mother are her children's problem, and the burden of raising them is distributed among other family members.

By the way, is Elizabeth Holmes married? Whose children are they?

Another rich heir. They mostly reproduce with each other and with top sport/entertainment people, but her reputation made that only the first category is available to her.

or perhaps not every human decision /behavior should be interpreted with too much intentions. Most likely she actually believed in how it could have worked out.

There is a difference between believing she operates under such cold calculus, and not believing she doesn't. I could be convinced one way, but not the other.

> . I feel bad for everyone effected and yes even her.

While I do feel bad about the kids, I also know that society has normalised taking children away from one parent, often with little to no recourse.

So while I feel bad for the kids, it's no worse than what society has done to million of children, and do to thousands per day, even as I type out this message.

At least her kids will have advantages the other kids don't get.

Do not feel bad for her. Do not even give her a single thought.

She's still a person. I agree with the weight of the sentencing and the amount she received and that she should never be allowed to be a director of a company again, but there's got to still be a small evolutionary part that empathises with anyone looking down the barrel of consequences of this magnitude.

if you focus enough on someones misery you can feel bad for anybody ... even Ted Bundy or Hitler ... but empathy is resource that should be wisely spent and allocated. instead of focusing on people who caused harm to others I can choose to do so for people who didn't. after all compassion isn't working in parallel

It's pretty important to dehumanize and de-empathize with people who offend or break the law. A good justice system and society is built in doling out punishments without reflection or understanding.

I see the valid point you make about how civilization should strive to be above cruel, black/white judgement and ideally encourage empathy towards others in order to be considered just. But I also can't argue against an average citizen not having enough empathy/attention to give (from the limited pool we all have) to one of the biggest and most infamous con artists of our time. It's not like she's in there for just doing drugs.

Law should not be one's entire moral compass, but the things she did are undeniably extreme.

Huh, you may be right.

Despite me being pretty sure you're being sarcastic.

Well then they she shouldn't have decided to get pregnant as sson as the jury decided to convene.

Obviously it sucks for the kids. But they're rich. They'll have good foster care. And she doesn't care that she can't see them, she knee that was a risk when she had them, she took that gamble to try to stay out of prison.

This is psychopath we are talking about. And letting her off the hook because she has kids is going to encourage every other psychopath to do the same. That'll create more orphans in the long term.

She likely had children because she thought it would make her more sympathetic. Unlikely given how she acts and treats all around her that the children are more than pawns in her game.

Imagine being her child; imagine growing up knowing that in all likelihood, you only exist because your mother wanted to stay out of prison.

I think the worst part is that she could have done the work to change as a person, realize her narcissism, realize how to overcome that and perceive the world differently. Yet it won't matter. Her children will always be perceived this way. At least in the near term. I imagine by the time they are in their 20s they will have some kind of personality disorder as well.

Get in line with the billions of other people with unsatisfactory lives.

i suppose the good news is her child will always have the money to pay for all the therapy to handle those issues herself.

Don't worry. She will absolutely not serve 10 years.

What is the minimum she must serve?

OP is absolutely wrong about this. Federal law requires that you serve 85% of your sentence before becoming eligible for parole or early release. She'll serve at minimum 9.5 years, (so, technically correct, but not what OP likely meant) unless she's pardoned or the sentence is overturned on a further appeal.

You're right, of course. Our nation would never be lenient on white collar crime.

She chose to have those children, most likely as a bargainimg chip, so that makes her an even worse person in my book. I hope she rots in there.

I haven't followed this closely but frankly I feel similarly. I think only people who are violent and dangerous to other people should be locked up, and even then only until they are no longer dangerous.

If things can be organised so she is no longer capable of defrauding people (banned from holding certain positions in companies etc.) I don't see why she should be locked up.

I'm sure I would feel differently if I had been defrauded by her, but isn't that exactly why the burden of justice fulls on people other than the aggrieved?

I sympathise with this view in general and with her situation having kids she won't be able to see for 10 years.

But us I understand in this specific case she played an important role in driving one of her employees to suicide, and her fraud concerning her tech is not just financial, it was giving people false information about their health, including cancer - which is close to violence to me.

In fact my sympathy with this case is not that it is too harsh for a small crime (fraud), it is that the crime is so huge that she must have been psychopath and might deserve mental treatment. Genuinely how can someone live with giving hundred of thousands of people false health information based on a test they know is garbage?

So what consequences do you propose for those that create such frauds that should act as an effective deterrent? Being 'demoted' after the fact doesn't really encourage anyone not to get to the top and do fraud in the first place.

She is dangerous to other people. Let's not forget that this was medical fraud - people's lives were affected due to bad diagnoses.

> I think only people who are violent and dangerous to other people should be locked up, and even then only until they are no longer dangerous.

What about people who knowingly allow the blood of cancer patents to be tested using technology which they know does not work?

You're discounting the deterrent effect. Defrauding investors has a huge negative impact on society, to say nothing of bogus blood test results, deceiving regulators, and ruthlessly threatening legal actions against whistleblowers and journalists.

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