Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes's arguments for new trial deemed spurious – just like her tech Elizabeth Holmes, founder of debunked blood-testing startup Theranos, will be sentenced next week after a federal judge denied her request for a new trial. In January 2022, Holmes, 38, was convicted on charges of wire fraud and defrauding investors. Her lawyers, however, argued she deserved a fresh trial when key witness Adam …
Wealthy? Does that mean she gets to keep the proceeds of her fraud?
From the point of view of a legal team on contingency, she's wealthy until she runs out of appeals. Which is what's just happened, it appears.
Honestly I don't have a problem with that, either. She's entitled to a defense. I'm not questioning the verdict, and I suspect if I'd been on the jury I would have voted to convict as well.
But I also agree that we need better funding for public defense, to reduce inequity in the system. And we need to cut down on prosecutorial abuse of the plea-bargain system, and on the "chickenshit prosecutor" phenomenon that discourages prosecution of wealthy and powerful offenders.
Not only was the prosecution's case strong enough that no one witness would sink it, the woman went and got herself pregnant in a pretty shameless and obvious attempt to keep her out of prison as much as possible.
And even if we believe her story that she was in an abusive relationship, in the US that is not an excuse for the massive fraud she was part of. Not to mention how people's health was put in jeopardy because of that fraud. I don't care about the investors who claim they were defrauded... you pays your money and you takes your chances when you choose to invest in a company. The doctors and their patients who were defrauded are the people I care about. So she can go directly to jail. Do not pass go, do not collect any reduced sentences for being pregnant.
The trial originally shows a little evidence that suggested that she had made a scientific assumption, based on what she was seeing, that had problems that she did not completely understand looking at the science results that she was working with.
But the people running her company were busy setting things up to convince the corporate environment that they could make a hell of a lot of money from her ideas, but there was nothing done to show that the whole thing was working. When the issues became transparent she was prosecuted (essentially for incomplete science errors) but the money grippers running Theranos were all seen as innocent and are very happy now because they have got away with it.
Scientific errors are errors, not crimes - so we're busy punishing her for errors and letting the management get away with their actions.
She was a student in college when she thought she had a potential solution to a reported problem, certainly she was wrong but the people managing her were dumber, initially thinking she was right and then running into the "let's make money" world, not the medical safety world.
You won't get any arguments from me about the people who gave her money being dumb; there's a reason she got no investors who knew anything about the industry. The rest of your claims, however, are complete rubbish.
She was a student when she recognized the existence of a problem. She didn't have any knowledge of how to accomplish what she wanted. It's like me saying "I've discovered that it takes a while to fly on planes and faster ones are really expensive. I know, let's build a cheap faster plane". That's all well and good, but I don't know how to build a cheap faster plane and she didn't know how to build a blood testing machine that worked on smaller samples. After trying to build one and recognizing that she didn't have a clue what she was doing, she started lying about it and submitting fraudulent documents to investors to steal their money, knowing the goal was not being achieved. Until that started, she was just stupid, not a criminal, but it only took a few months to make the switch.
First of all, she knew the company's products didn't work. She knew she was conning investors and potential business partners like Walgreens. She's been found guilty of that.
Next, she was the management. She was the CEO. You seem to be suggesting she made minor scientific errors and was deceived by her employees. That's utter nonsense. As her criminal conviction proves.
IIRC one of her defences was she was a naive young woman who got lead astray and didn't know what the company she ran was doing. The jury saw that for the pathetic bullshit it was. It's no different from the "bad boy did it and ran away" excuse we'd try as toddlers. It didn't work then and it doesn't work now.
Frankly, Holmes and Badwani (sp?) are lucky not to be facing manslaughter charges. People have probably died because of the faked blood test results from those dodgy devices that didn't do what Theranos claimed. Others will have faced life-changing medical conditions that would have been successfully treated or at least alleviated if Theranos's products worked.
A woman who said she was left to give birth to her baby alone on the dirty, concrete floor of her jail cell in Maryland filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday alleging that jail nurses ignored her screams and pleas for help for six hours ... Valentine claims she punched the walls of her solitary confinement cell, which did not have blankets or sheets, during her most painful contractions and removed what she believed was her baby’s amniotic sac and slid it under her cell door to prove she was about to have a baby ... Because of the unsanitary conditions in the cell, the baby developed a type of staph bacteria infection that is resistant to many antibiotics, the lawsuit said ... The lawsuit is similar to one filed in 2019 by a woman who gave birth alone in Denver’s jail the year before, claiming that nurses and deputies ignored her pleas for help for five hours.
By which I mean:
A hereditary head of state
An upper house that includes the 7th Earl of Minto, Andrew Lloyd Webber, and a bunch of bishops
A lower house that is not proportionally elected and which allows the selection of a new head of government without consulting the electorate
Roj Blake,
A hereditary head of state
A quick Google tells me that 43 countries have monarchies. Many of them democracies, and some with proportionally elected parliaments (seeing as that's important to you). In Europe alone there's the UK, Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Norway, Sweden, Luxembourg, Lichtenstein as well as the smaller stranger ones like Andorra (with two rulers one of them the President of France). And then of course Commonwealth countries that haven't bothered to get their own President / King.
Elected presidents are also not that common. Many are chose by countries' Parliaments, rather than by public election. At least if they're serving as ceremonial (and powerless) heads of state - in the same way that constitutional monarchs now serve for most European democracies. Including the UK.
An upper house that includes the 7th Earl of Minto, Andrew Lloyd Webber, and a bunch of bishops
Loads of countries appoint their upper houses. Or large parts of them. The only elected members of the house of Lords are in fact the heriditary peers. As 90-odd of them are elected by the rest of the chamber. This is because many of them were doing a good job when Labour wanted to reform the Lords - so some were kept as a compromise. Rather fittingly odd, given the way our constitution has evolved over the centuries.
A lower house that is not proportionally elected and which allows the selection of a new head of government without consulting the electorate
This though shows your utter ignorance of how democracies vote.
Israel is the only country I can think of where the Prime Minister was directly elected by the voters. Separate to the votes for MPs. And that was only a brief experiment in the 90s, that was supposed to give more stable governments - but didn't. So they got rid of it.
Most countries that have proportional parliaments don't have two party systems. This means that not only do electorates get no say in who their Prime Minister is going to be - they don't even necessarily know who it's going to be after the election. Because a coalition will have to be formed and there may be several large leading parties who theoretically could lead it. So the PM will be decided by the coalition negotiations after the election with zero input from the public. And also no way for the public to get rid of a Prime Minister they don't like - seeing as a party could lose loads of seats in a subsequent election but might still stay on with the same coalition partners after the election and keep the same PM. Equally a coalition can break down and a different one be formed, without having a new election.
Presidential systems may also have proportionally elected parliaments. But in a presidential system the President needn't necessarily have a parliamentary majority at all.
There is no such thing as a perfect democracy. All systems are imperfect and have their problems. Counties with constant coalition governments may have less change in policy but that could just be because the country gets run according to the establishment groupthink that a majority of parties might subscribe to. See German Russia and energy policy for the last 50 years, as an example of how that can go rather badly wrong.
But proportional systems do give louder voices to smaller groups of the population, who find it easier to get national representation. This again can be both a good and a bad thing. In Israel if often gives disproportionate power to the most intransigent "settler" parties - who've often ended up as the swing-voters in coalition forming. But in most countries makes for a more pluralist political culture.
However the downside of small parties being needed to form coalitions is the big negative advantage of a constituency voting system. You can kick the bastards out! If enough of the population decide to gang up on one party, they can outvote that party's core support and get loads of their MPs kicked out in all but the safest seats.
To take a German example again, say you hated the FDP. They've always been a minor party, never usually getting more than 10% of the vote and often hovering around the 7% mark. And yet they were in government from 1949-1957 then from 1963-66 then from 69-98. So in the 51 years of post-war governments they were only out of power 9 of them. They've governed with both the CDU and the SPD - so in the late 20th Century it didn't matter who you voted for - you got the FDP. This isn't a major disaster, it's just a flaw of systems that encourage coalitions.
So be in favour of the system you believe in. Argue for it. But understand it. And don't claim that the system you don't like isn't democratic and then cite reasons for that which also apply to the systems you favour.
"The US has never been a democracy. It is, and has always been, a constitutional republic."
Considering that, so far, 124 people have been elected to power that have publicly stated that Donald Trump "really won" the 2020 Presidential election, it may not even be that for much longer.
They're not likely to leave the baby in there after it's born, you know. As for the mother, it is a place for them if they're convicted criminals, and she is. Pregnancy isn't an escape mechanism. If the prisons don't have the ability to look after someone with those medical needs, then they're either not intended to and she'd be sent to one that has the required facilities, or the prison isn't fit for purpose, but in both cases, that's a possible problem with a particular prison, not a reason she should be exempt from anything.
This is normal, El Reg is normally very accurate about events, the down-votes all suggest that most of my snivelling miserable friends are only reading today's explanations, but never watched what was happening originally when this was being sold as a "great solution" and everyone thought it was a great improvement back in the old days.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
