Elizabeth Holmes is not going to prison – for the moment Elizabeth Holmes, the now-former CEO of the imploded blood-testing startup Theranos who was convicted of conspiracy and wire fraud over her role in defrauding investors, has managed to delay the start of her 11-year prison sentence, which was due to begin tomorrow. In a last-ditch appeal [PDF] to the Ninth Circuit Court of …
If you can't do the time, don't do the crime.
Alternatively, use the money you bilked from a bunch of gullible idiots to pay for a solid legal team.
Let's see how long her partner in crime actually spends in jail on that 12 year, 11 month sentence.
Rich white collar criminals seldom pay even when caught.
Minimum security is a possibility, but watering down isn't, unless he's planning on appealing and hoping for a better outcome. If he were planning on that he likely would have done it by now. There really isn't a lot of wiggle room on federal sentences once they're handed down, unless you're a political operative who can expect a pardon from an outgoing President.
None of whom are likely to have any knowledge of biological or medical science. But that's true of most investors and the domains in which they invest. The system depends on honesty when the investment is offered. I could envisage a less extreme case where the investors do have some knowledge and the project looks sufficiently feasible but isn't.
Yeah that's true, but it would not take a genius to ask Theranos to produce a blood test on yourself (as a potential investor) and then compare that to an independent traditional blood test and compare the results. Indeed some of the investors tried to do this, but Theranos fobbed them off. At this point in the due diligence the sensible ones walked away. If you are going to invest millions of dollars+ into a venture, it's really a no brainer to spend a few hundred validating their claims.
>No-one does due diligence.
If you're dealing with real vulture capitalists then they do have people in place to evaluate the businesses that are asking for finance. They're ofen people who have successfully started companies that the VC firm had funded in the past.
VCs take risks but they're calculated risks. I think the trick with Theranos was that they kept away from real VCs and went directly to potential investors using the 'firends and fanily'trick. This is what may have tipped the scale from 'bright idea but it really wasn't viable so tough luck' to 'they're running a scam'.
@llaryllama
You clearly don't understand the US legal system.
Even a cursory glance will show you that there is a disproportionate amount of poor (mainly black) persons in prison. It's well known if you are poor, black you are more likely to go to prison for a minor crime, than a rich white person is for a major crime. Throw in the bias towards ethnical biased laws and the issue is multiplied. Add to that bail bonds the poor can't afford, then you are already in prison for a major length of time, even if innocent.
It's not known as the best legal system
"A street kid gets arrested, gonna do some time
he got out three years from now just to commit more crime
A businessman is caught with 24 kilos, he's out on bail and out of jail and that's the way it goes"
There's also a difference between federal and state charges, when it comes to bail policy. If you're being charged with a federal crime, the presumption is that you should be allowed out on bail. The government has to demonstrate you're a flight risk in order to deny it. State and local court systems vary more and often are more subjective and punitive.
Weathy people who steal millions get far, far softer treatment from the criminal justice system than poor people who commit petty crime. If Holmes wasn't one of the privileged elite and had stolen $50 of tat from Walmart, they'd have thrown her in jail long ago.
Depends on the legal system but normally the sentence starts when incarceration starts. Time in detention before trial is often recognised, which is why many people who've been on remand are released after sentencing because it takes so long to go to trial.
I'm still not convinced that the sentence matches the crime. Yes, it was fraud, but that happens all the time in America and punishments are slight. Look at the case of Marin Shrkeli. His crimes were arguably greater but his sentence shorter (7 years) and we was released after 4. Silicon Valley routinely lure investors into putting their money into questionable business schemes. And yet, despite multiple high profile failures, the system continues essentially unchanged.
In the UK at least, sentence guidelines take into account all sorts of things from pleading guilty from the outset to whether remorse is shown etc. If there's a range available, I'd expect people who "play" the system and keep appealing and losing might get a longer sentence than someone who accepts the guilty verdict in the first place. But, as with so many court cases, it's always possible that the verdict is actually wrong for any of a number of reasons and so an appeals process is rightly part of the system. I think under UK law it is required that all known evidence is produced during the case and appeals are granted based on technical failures in the original case or if genuinely new evidence likely to affect the original verdict which can be shown to be not previously known to either party. From what I've seen of some US court cases, it seems like the defendants legal team only provide the minimum evidence they think they need to win the case. When they fail, they then appeal with the second string evidence they already knew about but didn't use. This seems to mean, as in this case, constant and seemingly never ending appeals over years.
"I'm still not convinced that the sentence matches the crime."
Perhaps the court paid more attention to those people who paid for tests whose fraudulant results have lead to real harm?
Defrauding an equally crooked pack of foolish investors of their ill gotten gains is barely a crime.
I think one of Buffet's rule of investing was to first understand the business.
Have the prosecutors checked to make sure she hasn't booked another flight to Mexico or Canada? Hopefully they put her on the no-fly list until her sentence is served or overturned and alerted TSA and border patrol to be on the lookout for her on the off chance she attempts going by train, boat, or some other method.
The no-fly list is a giant pile of crap, and "Elizabeth Holmes" doesn't seem like a particularly unusual name. Just have her surrender her passport; that should make leaving by commercial air travel sufficiently difficult. (If she can get a forged passport, she can get one under a different name, so the no-fly would still be useless.)
You can walk over the border into Mexico or Canada. The smart move would be to walk over the border to Tijuana's airport -- there's a walkway that joins the US to this airport, its right by the border fence -- and then catch a flight to.....whereever.
If you're expecting people to look out for you at this point then you can just park your car at the border and walk through the gate at San Ysidro. Then get a taxi to the airport.
This is the lesson of Facebook: start the cheating out on a small scale, and ramp it up as you accumulate capital.
Homes got greedy, ramped up the cheating more quickly than she could build defenses against the victims.
Hate thieves, but we've let the US turn into a haven for them. The big ones are never called to account.
Elizabeth is a perfect summary of all that is wrong with America.
Why do they worship CEOs when they are all people of the worst kind who multiply everything that is bad.
Who built up China, and sent all that technology and skills to become a world power ? People like Elizabeth.
Why is there no healthcare or workers rights people like Elizabeth.
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