Nov 18, 2022
The Standard Arguments Rich People Make To Avoid Jail. Elizabeth Holmes Has Made Them All
I wonder how defendants who are not members of the upper class view the “let her go” pleas made in support of Elizabeth Holmes
By David Grace (Amazon Page — David Grace Website)
Written on the Thursday afternoon just prior to Friday’s sentencing of Elizabeth Holmes.
Background On Holmes & Theranos
As a teenager, Elizabeth Holmes told people that her goal in life was to become a billionaire.
She was raised by a wealthy family where she was given every advantage. She was admitted to Stanford University in 2002, but she attended for only her freshman year, then dropped out.
In 2003, at age nineteen, she founded Theranos thinking that she could somehow invent a machine that could perform hundreds of blood tests in a few minutes using only a few drops of blood.
Over the fifteen years of the company’s existence, Holmes raised over seven-hundred million dollars based on the false claim that the company had, in fact, invented such a machine.
Despite hundreds of millions of dollars spent on research over a period of more than a dozen years, Theranos never succeeded in building a machine that could reliably test human blood at all for many conditions, leastwise accurately perform hundreds of tests on only a few drops of blood.
The claims about Theranos’ technology were never true.
In order to hide the truth that their machines did not work as claimed, Theranos used blood testing equipment it had purchased from Siemens to test blood samples collected from members of the public, and it falsified the test results to make it appear that the tests had instead been performed by Theranos machines.
Prosecutors argued that Theranos had endangered people’s lives by promoting and producing inaccurate blood tests.
Some of the people who knew that the Theranos machines didn’t work as had been claimed spoke out. Holmes denied their reports and did whatever she could to silence and discredit them. Tyler Schultz’s family was forced to spend almost half a million dollars in legal fees to defend him from Holmes’ and Theranos’ campaign against him.
Based on Holmes’ false claims, people invested over $700 million in Theranos, all of which was lost.
Before Theranos crashed, Holmes lived a luxurious life with a mansion, flying in private jets, the best food, clothing, hotels, vehicles, parties, and celebrity galas. The Theranos money funded a billionaire’s life style and an A-List movie star’s celebrity.
Her personal benefits from the lies she told about Theranos’ technology were massive.
After the truth became known and the company failed, Holmes was convicted of one count of conspiracy to defraud investors by wire fraud and three counts of defrauding investors by wire fraud relating to wire transfers totaling more than $140 million dollars.
Let’s Compare Holmes’ Case To That Of A Very Different Criminal
As a comparison, let’s consider the case of the fictional Deshawn Washington.
Deshawn grew up in a one-parent household. His mother worked a minimum-wage job. Unemployment in his neighborhood was 20% and it was under the control of a violent gang. By age twenty-three Deshawn had a conviction for shoplifting and one for possession of cocaine.
Deshawn was next arrested for robbing a 7–11 with a fake gun and stealing $143. He is facing a sentence of nine years in state prison.
Mario Puzo got it right when he said, “One [strikeout “lawyer”] convincing liar with a briefcase can steal more than a hundred men with guns ….”
Give Her A Light Sentence
Holmes’ Family and supporters have made various arguments to the judge in an attempt to convince him to give her little to no jail time.
The “No Prior Criminal Record” Defense
Elizabeth Holmes and her supporters argue that she should receive a sentence of no more than a year and a half in a prison for white-collar criminals, a “Club Fed”, because, unlike Dreshawn, she has no prior criminal record.
Why would she? Her parents are wealthy. She lived in a safe, upper-class neighborhood. She attended the best schools. She was never exposed to any situation where she would want or need to shoplift or sell drugs or commit any of the crimes that would be common among Deshawn’s peers.
Please note that while Deshawn’s crime lasted maybe three or four minutes, Elizabeth Holmes’ lies and investment scam continued over a period of more than ten years. If you consider each lie, each investment she obtained based on each set of lies as a separate event, then it can be argued that she committed dozens, perhaps hundreds of crimes in more than ten years of a continuing fraud.
That doesn’t sound exactly like a one offense to me.
Is the rule going to be that you can defraud dozens of people with many lies over many, many years, gaining hundreds of millions of dollars and receive a slap on the wrist because that is your “first offense”?
Are we supposed to wait until she starts another company and defrauds an entirely different group of suckers before imposing a second-offense sentence that perhaps approaches the nine years Deshawn will get for stealing his $143 with a plastic gun?
She Just Wanted It To Be True Too Much
The next argument was that Holmes was so determined to do a great thing that she convinced herself that she would succeed. It would have been so wonderful, her defenders say, if the machine had worked. She should get a pass, they say, because she just wanted it to work too much.
After Othello murdered Desdemona he tried to excuse his crime by claiming that he should be remembered as a man who had just loved not wisely but too well.
That was small comfort to Desdemona.
In Holmes’ case, her defense apparently is that she just wanted it to be true so much that she deluded herself into believing her own lies. Really? She’s claiming that she didn’t actually know it didn’t work?
That sophistry didn’t work for Othello and it shouldn’t work for her.
But It Would Have Been So Wonderful If Her Lies Were True
Then there is the argument that the goal of the fraud was so lofty that the reality of the lies shouldn’t matter very much.
So, if the benefits from a scam would be really great if only the lies were true then apparently telling those sorts of lies is a less serious crime than lying about, oh, needing investors to find and exploit a long-lost gold mine.
Under that logic, if someone falsely claimed to have a cure for breast cancer and collected hundreds of millions of dollars to commercialize the non-existent cure, the criminal should get a lighter sentence because the fake technology would have been so wonderful if only it hadn’t been a fraud.
You know what? It would be great to have anti-gravity, a limitless source of free electrical power, a battery that would allow a car to travel 10,000 miles before it needed a charge, a pill that would let everyone lose all the weight they wanted, and a shot that would cure all drug and alcohol addiction.
Should someone who collected hundreds of millions of dollars by falsely claiming to have invented any of those technologies be given a pass because the product upon which the scam was based would have been so wonderful if only it had actually worked?
Please!
Let Her Go Because She’s Suffered Enough
She Lost Her Money
Her mother argued, that, “Elizabeth has suffered enormously and lost everything: all her work, her company, her money that she put into starting and building the company, the stock she bought. She will forever be associated with this failure.”
Her money? It wasn’t her money. All her so-called money was the investors’ money that she defrauded them out of with her lies about her company’s technology.
Associated with this failure? She was the founder, creator, architect and operator of this failure. Why shouldn’t her name be forever linked to it? Would Charles Ponzi be entitled to complain that it was unfair that his name would forever be “associated” with a fundamental form of financial fraud?
She’s Lost Her Privacy
The next argument that Holmes’ supporters make is that she has suffered enough because she doesn’t have any privacy any more and has moved multiple times after her home address was revealed.
Hey, wait. Isn’t this she person who was on the cover of Time Magazine BEFORE she was arrested? Isn’t it true that long before her company imploded her every appearance anywhere was fodder for social media?
She gave up her privacy when she self-promoted herself as the wonder woman who was going to revolutionize medical testing.
Scratch the “I’ve suffered enough because I’ve lost my privacy” argument.
But now her complaint is that people are booing her instead of applauding her, and that hurts so much!
People Are Mean To Her
“There is no avoiding the scorn that accompanies Elizabeth Holmes,” her husband wrote to the judge.
This is like a father lamenting that “I’ve been punished so much by how badly my family and friends treat me now that people have found out that I raped my daughter.”
This is the “You should feel sorry for me because now that I’ve murdered my parents I’m going to be forced to live my life as an orphan” defense.
Nicholas Cruz, who murdered seventeen people in a Florida school massacre, argued that the jury should show him mercy because he has to live every day with the guilt he suffers because of all the people he killed.
There’s a cause and effect here. You do something wrong. You get caught. People don’t like you. Why do you think that you should get a lesser sentence because people not liking is unpleasant?
The appropriate response to that argument is, “If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime.”
Going To Jail Isn’t The Only Bad Thing That Happens To Criminals
Where did Holmes’ defenders get the idea that the ONLY punishment for committing a crime should be how many years you spend in jail? Who told them that the public scrutiny, the social rejection, and the other uncomfortable consequences from choosing to be a criminal are unfair?
These people seem to have the ridiculous notion that there is only one, single, fixed quantum of punishment that each criminal should suffer as the result of their crime and if they are shunned or if people point at them when they go to the grocery store or if have to spend a lot of money on lawyers then that non-judicial pain should somehow count toward a reduction in the amount of jail time they get, some sort of unhappiness offset like a credit for time served.
So, I guess because Deshawn won’t have those attorney’s fees and press attention and public disapproval he should do the whole nine years for stealing $143 with a fake gun, but Elizabeth’s discomfort at being stalked by the paparazzi, and not in a nice way, should cut her sentence for defrauding people out of hundreds of million dollars down to eighteen months in Club Fed.
Only One Of The Many Costs Of Being A Criminal Is Jail
Hey, when you commit four felonies and spend years collecting millions of dollars based on years of lies, there are lots of bad things that will accrue to you when you get caught and jail is only one of them.
You don’t get to complain about how unfair the other consequences of your crime are.
It’s All Somebody Else’s Fault
Her next argument is that it was all other people’s fault.
- Sunny Balwani somehow hypnotized her into telling all those lies.
- The scientists failed her by not building a machine that matched the promises she was making.
- Her executives failed to strongly enough impress upon her the fact that the damn thing didn’t work.
- The lawyers failed to warn her strongly enough that the lies she was telling to get the investors’ money constituted a crime.
If only the jury would have understood that she was just an innocent bystander and that none of this was her fault.
This is the “Give me a light sentence because the jury was wrong” argument.
No, you don’t get to ask for a lighter sentence because “the jury got it wrong.”
The jury said you weren’t an innocent bystander, that other people aren’t responsible for your criminal conduct, that you are.
These Are The Kinds Of Things Rich People Always Say When They Get Caught
Lock me up? I know U.S. Senators. I went to Stanford. I live in a mansion. My family is rich. I can’t go to jail. Unlike those loser, minimum wage, high-school dropout criminals, it would be a terrible loss to society if my bright future was ruined by several years in jail. You can’t compare the value of their lives to mine.
The Brock Turner Case
Stanford student Brock Turner raped a young woman, but the judge, Aaron Persky, a Stanford grad (as am I) bought the (1) first offense; (2) he’s from a good (meaning wealthy) family; (3) he has a bright future ahead of him (except that he’s a rapist) defense, and gave Turner a sentence that resulted in his serving three months in the County jail.
I am pleased to tell you that the citizens of Santa Clara County were so outraged by this slap-on-the-wrist that they removed Persky from office and he’s no longer allowed to decide the sentence for anyone.
I’ve often wondered if Persky had previously sentenced any rapists who weren’t from wealthy families, but instead were barely high-school graduates and had a bleak, minimum-wage future ahead of them. If so, did he give them a few months in the county jail or did he send them to state prison?
Ethan Couch Case
Remember the “affluenza” case where, while driving with a blood alcohol THREE TIMES the drunk-driving limit, teenager Ethan Couch ran over and killed four pedestrians and received a sentence of straight probation because, his attorney successfully argued, his wealthy parents had so spoiled him that he didn’t know right from wrong?
I’m sure that the good (wealthy) family and related “bright future” arguments were persuasive there as well.
As a retired lawyer, it saddens me to say that while the law may be the same for rich people and poor ones, the punishment for breaking the law is sometimes very different.
On the other hand, Bernie Madoff made some of the same arguments and he was sentenced to 150 years. Still, he wasn’t a pretty, young, pregnant woman.
I will be interested to see tomorrow what the judge does with Elizabeth Holmes.
UPDATE: Judge Edward Davila sentenced Elizabeth Holmes to 11 1/4 years in federal prison. Less than the 15 years requested by the prosecution but more than the 9 years recommended by the Probation Department in their pre-sentence report.
It looks like he did not buy the defendant’s arguments for leniency.
— David Grace (Amazon Page — David Grace Website)
