Today In Justice

So Elizabeth Holmes is going for an extended stay at the Grey Bar Hotel. Not because she fucked over part of the healthcare system and put patients lives at risk - and sent private detectives after at least one of the witnesses against her - but because she bilked rich people out of some of their investment capital, making "the smart guys" look bad. And we just can't have that.

In the end, the particulars matter slightly less than the fact that it appears she'll be pulling a good long stretch of hard time. I just really wish we'd attach more weight to the part about hurting real people and less about the fucking money.

(pay wall)

Elizabeth Holmes sentenced to more than 11 years in prison

The former Theranos CEO was convicted on four counts of fraud early this year

Former Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes was sentenced to more than 11 years in prison Friday for misleading investors regarding her blood-testing start-up.

The entrepreneur — who started Theranos as a Stanford University dropout and grew it into a company with a peak valuation of $9 billion — was convicted in January of misleading investors that her technology could run hundreds of tests from just a few drops of blood. In reality, the company was relying on technology from other companies to run the tests.

She was convicted of four counts of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud after a four-month-long trial that featured testimony and tales of billionaire investors, former U.S. officials’ endorsement and patients who had used the company’s technology. Holmes also took the stand over the course of seven days in emotional testimony defending her actions as being in good faith and denying that she was aware of the fraud.

On Friday, Federal District Judge Edward J. Davila sentenced her to prison beginning on April 27.

“The tragedy of the case is that Ms. Holmes is brilliant,” the judge said in a lengthy statement. She fought herself into a male-dominated world and people gravitated toward her vision and drive, he said.

“She made it, she got into that world.” But the venture capital world also doesn’t condone fraud, he said.

The sentencing is the conclusion of the years-long saga of Holmes, during which she was once hailed as a hero for female entrepreneurs before a dramatic fall to become the notorious founder of a crumpled company. Now the subject of an HBO documentary, a Hulu TV series, a best-selling book and multiple podcasts, Holmes has become one of the most famous tech start-up CEOs, as well as a cautionary tale for how badly an ambitious start-up can spin out of control.

“The message to Silicon Valley and other entrepreneurs is have a dream, invest in it, but be honest with investors about where you are, and don’t commit fraud,” said Jason Linder, a former federal prosecutor, who is now a partner at corporate law firm Mayer Brown and has been following the case.

Holmes spoke before the judge handed down her sentence. She cried as she read from notes, breaking the staid composure she had held throughout the day and through most previous court appearances.

“I take responsibility for Theranos,” she said. “I regret my failings with every cell in my body.”

After her sentence was read, she stood up and was embraced by her family, burying her face in their shoulders. She then quickly left the court room as journalists and her supporters stood quietly before filing out.

Later, she and her partner left the court building through a side entrance, dodging a large group of photographers and TV camera people who had assembled outside the main door. She jumped in a black SUV, which quickly drove off.

Since Theranos crumbled, Holmes has kept a low profile. She lives in Silicon Valley with her partner and son, and has been volunteering at a crisis line for sexual assault survivors. She is pregnant with their second child.

Holmes started the company in 2003 when she was just 19 years old with the promise to develop technology that would eliminate the need for drawing tubes and tubes of blood to run diagnostic tests. She quickly drew in investors, attracting hundreds of millions of dollars in investment from prominent businesspeople and political figures including Larry Ellison, Rupert Murdoch and others. Holmes also attracted big-name statesmen such as Henry Kissinger and Jim Mattis to her board of directors.

Federal prosecutors were asking the judge to sentence her to 15 years in prison, as well as require restitution of about $800 million to pay back investors and business partners.

She leased space in a famed Silicon Valley office park and hired hundreds of employees. After her start-up went public with its ambitions roughly a decade ago, Holmes soared to fame. She was one of the few young female founders in a competitive tech world that still often features White, male CEOs.

The media took notice, putting her on the covers of magazines including, Forbes, Fortune and Inc. as well as speaking at conferences and giving a TEDMED Talk. She inked deals with Walgreens and Safeway to put her technology — a small blood-testing machine, known as the Edison, that purported to use “nanotainers” that needed just a finger prick’s worth of blood to test for everything from cholesterol to herpes.

But internally, it was a different story, according to testimony at her trial last year. Theranos’s proprietary technology could in reality run only about a dozen tests, and witnesses said it didn’t always do those reliably.

During the trial, former employees testified about growing concern within the company about how quickly Theranos was pushing to use the technology on patients. Former Walgreens and Safeway executives said they didn’t realize Theranos was using other company’s traditional machines to process blood tests. And former defense secretary Jim Mattis, who served on the company’s board, said he would have had a different view of the company if he had known the limitations of the Theranos blood-testing device.

“It would have tempered my enthusiasm significantly,” he said in court.

A Wall Street Journal investigation in 2015 revealed that Theranos was relying on traditional lab testing machines and typical blood draws to run many of its tests.

Regulators started investigating the company, and Theranos went on the defensive. Holmes’s empire and public image began to crumble.

A federal regulator of laboratories found deficiencies at the company’s lab that “pose immediate jeopardy to patient health and safety.” Holmes was eventually barred from owning or operating a medical lab for at least two years. And in 2018, she was charged with massive fraud by the Securities and Exchange Commission, which she paid a hefty fine to settle. She left Theranos that year and the company shuttered soon after.

Holmes was originally charged with her former business and romantic partner Sunny Balwani. He was convicted on 12 counts in a separate trial this summer, and is scheduled to be sentenced in December.

Prosecutor Jeff Schenk told the court during the hearing Friday that a 15-year sentence was in line with guidelines for Holmes’s crimes.

“When faced with the choice of allowing Theranos to fail, Ms. Holmes made the choice to defraud her investors,” he said.

Schenk argued that because Holmes had not apologized for the fraud or admitted wrongdoing, the court should give her a serious sentence that would act as a strong deterrent to committing new crimes.

The judge asked if any victims wanted to speak. Alex Shultz, father of Theranos whistleblower Tyler Shultz, stood up and said that Holmes hired a private investigator to follow his son when Theranos suspected Tyler Shultz had spoken to media about the company.

Perspective: Elizabeth Holmes used every trope in the book

“It was a grueling experience to go through, I feel like my family home was desecrated by Elizabeth and the lawyers,” he said.

Holmes’s defense lawyers asked the judge to sentence her to 18 months in prison, or home confinement plus community service hours.

Holmes’s defense lawyer, Kevin Downey, said in court she never cashed out when she had the chance and was deprived of her support network during much of the time she was running Theranos.

Holmes testified on the stand for more than 20 hours during the trial last year, speaking publicly for one of the first times in years and drawing a crowd of reporters and members of the public to see her in person. She told the jury that she was always acting in good faith — trying to create and sustain a technology that would help people.

Holmes admitted on the stand during her trial that Theranos was running blood tests on modified third-party machines without telling its business partners and that she added the logos of two pharmaceutical companies to studies that the company sent to investors. She said she did not intentionally mean to deceive them.

“They weren’t interested in today or tomorrow or next month,” she said. “They were interested in what kind of change we could make.”

Balwani, Holmes’s former partner, was charged together with Holmes before his case was later severed when Holmes alleged he had abused her for years. Balwani has denied the allegations.

More than 100 people wrote letters in support of Holmes for her sentencing memo, including former employees, investors and even New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, who said he met Holmes years before she was charged.

“In the years since, I’ve always been struck by the way our conversations focused on her desires to make a positive impact on the world,” he wrote.

Holmes’s partner Evans also wrote to the judge, seeking to describe a different Holmes than had been portrayed in the media. He extolled her “willingness to sacrifice herself for the greater good is something I greatly admire in her.”

He also wrote that “earlier this year, while pregnant, she decided she wanted to swim the Golden Gate Bridge,” something that concerned Evans.

“Rain or shine she practiced, and her determination was overpowering the odds against her,” he wrote. “Two weeks before the event she made the cut off time, swimming the breaststroke. I was wrong, you would think by now I would learn to not discount her perseverance.”

Public Affairs

... conducted for private advantage.

4 U.S. Code § 8 - Respect for flag

(g)The flag should never have placed upon it, nor on any part of it, nor attached to it any mark, insignia, letter, word, figure, design, picture, or drawing of any nature.

Republicans have no honor.

Cold AF

The plains states - a full dozen of them - the middle third of this country has been stomped on by a storm and near-polar temperatures, and funnily enough, Texas is the only one reporting the kind of monumental problems that catch the fancy of the news cycle for a solid 72 hours.

Partly because they're just not used to that level of horrendous weather down there, and partly - mostly IMO - because the radical right decided to go all "fuck it, I can do what I want", and ignored the warnings from the Climate Science folks, and the warnings from the designers and engineers that the gear they were counting on for all that grandiose energy independence would crap out if it wasn't "winterized" properly - and gee, guess what happened.

The people in charge - ie: Republicans - decided low price was more important than the safety and wellbeing of the people paying the bills.

Of course, "low price" is coded political language which translates to serve two basic purposes

1. profit for the big shareholders
2. rationale for continuing the shitty anti-people policies that Republicans have been peddling for decades

Anyway, not even my enjoyment of watching Ted Cruz take it in the shorts because of his little jaunt down Mexico way can make this massive failure anything but bitter when we see the real cost being tallied.

And of course, it's not just Texas, and it's not just dumbass Republicans.

WaPo:

A boy who fell through ice, a woman who lost power: 47 deaths tied to winter storms — and counting

The cold has killed the young and the old. It has claimed lives from southern Texas to northern Ohio. And authorities expect the toll to rise in the coming days, with frigid weather lingering, hundreds of thousands without electricity and millions without clean water.

The two major winter storms that have plunged most of the United States into an Arctic chill have killed at least 47 people since Sunday, according to data compiled by The Washington Post. More than half of them — 30 — lived in Texas, where persistent power outages have exposed residents to bitter temperatures.

The Post’s data includes deaths confirmed or suspected to be linked to the weather and its attendant hardships, and the true number is undoubtedly higher than what is known so far. Some first responders worry about what they’ll find in their next week’s worth of wellness checks.

In Taylor County, Tex., Sheriff Ricky Bishop said his officers have been checking on residents for days, delivering food and water and following up with them later to make sure they’re all right. Already, they’ve found three people dead.

“There’s definitely that possibility that over the next week or two we could find some more that we don’t know about right now,” Bishop said.

The identities of most victims still aren’t known. Authorities have confirmed the ages of fewer than half, but of those, 18 were 50 or older and five were 85 and older. Seven states have at least one confirmed death.

Where the weather is coldest, some have resorted to risky, last-ditch attempts to keep warm, using gas grills indoors or running cars inside closed garages. At least five people have died of carbon monoxide poisoning.

“It’s heartbreaking,” Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo said in a news conference this week, tallying hundreds of 911 calls about gas poisoning. “This carbon monoxide poisoning is a disaster within a disaster.”

Others seem to have frozen to death. At least 17 people died of hypothermia or “exposure to the cold.” Some of them were among society’s most vulnerable.

Early Thursday, a man was found lifeless in a parking lot north of Houston. He was wearing a jacket with no shirt beneath, authorities said. He had no shoes and no socks.

About 350 miles northwest, in Abilene, another person was found dead whom the local fire chief described as “a transient” who had been sleeping outside.

Even those with shelter succumbed.

In rural eastern Kentucky, two elderly women from Ashland — a city of 20,000 on the banks of the Ohio River — died in 48 hours, both of hypothermia. One woman, age 77, lost power in her home, Boyd County Coroner Mark Hammond said. Her family, blocked by ice and felled trees, couldn’t reach her and couldn’t contact her. She was found on Wednesday.

Still others have died in cold weather accidents — in cars and on foot.

In Louisiana, a 77-year-old man in Calcasieu Parish, where Lake Charles is located, slipped, fell into a pool and drowned. And in Lafayette Parish, a 50-year-old man died after slipping on ice and slamming his head on the ground.

A 10-year-old boy died in Shelby County, Tenn., after falling through ice into a pond with his 6-year-old sister, who is in critical condition. When authorities arrived at the scene, it was just 14 degrees.

That boy is one of three known victims under the age of 12. Another, identified by Univision as Cristian Piñeda, was 11. His mother had just managed to get Cristian from Honduras to Texas so the two could live together, she told the outlet. With no electricity, she tried to cover him with blankets as best she could.

It was 12 degrees when Cristian’s mother put him to bed Monday night. He never woke up.

We'll always have bad weather, and we'll always see people die because of that weather. The point here is that we have to be better at assessing the risk, and being as prepared as possible, so we can mitigate that risk.

But mostly, we have to be better at holding politicians and their benefactors accountable when they fuck up like this.

Private profit and socialized risk and externalized cost. That shit has to stop.

Today's Moronicity

Lil Brian (bless his heart) tries to make a point about how the sheriff's limited resources are being stretched too thin by helping all those dirty immigrant invaders who're busily destroying USAmerica Inc by trying not to get fucked over - or something.

So here's a question:  How do we fix the problem of underfunded border security when "conservatives" refuse to support funding for better border security?

It's just too fucking typical of the over-delegating under-thinking kind of hands-off "Modern Management Mindset" that always always always ends up saying, "We need you to improve all this mess, but make sure you don't change anything - and just let us know what you need, as long as it's nothing".

These jag-offs wanna slag Obama with some bullshit about "leadership"?

PS) I'm betting there's a fair probability that somebody's good buddy/brother-in-law is putting together a really great private-sector (or even better, a public/private) solution that promises amazing results at the low low price of about 2 1/2 times what it'll cost us if we just figure out a coupla ways to treat people like people instead of using them as political theater props in order to turn their hardship into corporate profit.

No soul and no honor.

So, That Sucks

Some not very flattering things about KIPP (a charter school franchising scheme) are coming out.

From Schools Matter:

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) — A Manhattan mother says her 5-year-old son was locked in a padded room at school, leaving the kindergartner so traumatized he had to go to the hospital.

Taneka Hall said the “safe-calm room” at KIPP Star Elementary School in Washington Heights is used while children are placed in “time-out.” But as CBS 2′s John Slattery reported, she believes the discipline is abusive.On Dec. 3, Hall’s son, Xavier, who has had behavioral problems, was put in the room — which is padded with a window in the door. The charter school would not provide CBS 2 with a photo of the room.

Hall said Xavier was in the room alone and grew more agitated.“So they put him in the safe room, and there in the safe room, he then peed on himself and didn’t allow any teachers to come inside, so they decided to call 911,” she said.

Xavier was taken to NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital to be examined. The mother said the padded room, which he’d been in before, frightened him...

I don't know exactly what a really good teacher would or should do with a kid who's having a tough time getting a handle on certain of his internal impulses, but I think maybe locking him in a padded cell ain't it.

A 5-year-old.

In Solitary-Fucking-Confinement.

They say KIPP stands for Kids In Prison Program.  I guess now we know why they say that.

Lotsa Layers

Peel this one like an onion: