15 ms·

Theranos destroyed subpoenaed SQL blood test database, prosecutors say

342 points by samizdis 6y ago

lemonspat 6y ago
How has Elizabeth still not had her trial?!It keeps getting pushed back.. and more surprising, she got married in 2019 while awaiting trial?! Does that expose her new husband to financial liability from the fraud lawsuit?
- f430 6y ago
  The law is made for the rest of us. It doesn't apply to these folks. Not when your daddy knows Kissinger and other big shots.
  - permo-w 6y ago
    Kissinger is 97. I was shocked he’s even still alive
- colejohnson66 6y ago
  It doesn’t have to do with her wealth (although that does give her better lawyers). The justice system just moves slowly. Many people spend upwards of years before going to trial. This is nothing unusual. And getting married while awaiting trial is allowed because the accused hasn’t been convicted (hence, accused). (see edit below) What would be unusual is for the charges to be reduced or even dropped. But, as it stands, she’s facing 20 years in prison. Possibly more after this incident. EDIT: I wasn’t saying she wouldn’t be allowed to get married post-conviction. I was saying that, even if the right to marriage was removed when convicted, she’s still not convicted.
  - thaumasiotes 6y ago
    > And getting married while awaiting trial is allowed because the accused hasn’t been convicted (hence, accused). That's wrong; getting married while awaiting trial is allowed in the same way that getting married before being charged is allowed, and getting married after being convicted is allowed. The surprising thing is not that she was "allowed" to get married. Everyone is. The surprising thing is that someone was willing to marry her.
    - colejohnson66 6y ago
      (see my edit about my wording re: getting married) > The surprising thing is not that she was "allowed" to get married. Everyone is. The surprising thing is that someone was willing to marry her. People marry serial killers more often that one would want to believe. Just do a search for “serial killers married in prison” and you’ll see “top-10” clickbait lists on almost every result. Some people are just crazy and idolize convicts. Someone marrying Holmes is nothing novel. Maybe they were attracted to her psychopathic personality? That happens sometimes.
      - petra 6y ago
        Is she really psychopathic ? Many CEO's and entrepreneurs don't care about ethics. There's something about that career that does that to people. But that's quite different than being a psychopath like a serial killer is.
        vmception 6y ago
        > There's something about that career that does that to people. (Something about the people that the career enables and only sometimes makes visible)
        dmix 6y ago
        Indeed, this is a great example of a fallacy like survivors bias, where you only hear about a tiny percentage of cases because of x, which makes for a poor representation of the entire population. The vast majority of our interaction with CEO behaviour is via true crime stories and exceptional rare cases. I see Bill Gates and Steve Jobs as rare cases of an executives playing a huge role in their companies but I could list off countless billion dollar company CEOs people have ever heard of, let alone 99%+ companies are small/medium sized, many companies aren’t even public, countless play a much smaller and far more boring role, etc etc.
        modo_mario 6y ago
  - Blahah 6y ago
    I don't understand why getting married while awaiting trial is weird, nor why it makes a difference whether you've been convicted. You can get married before or after being convicted, in prison or otherwise. Criminal convictions don't affect your ability to get married.
    - josefx 6y ago
      It might open up ways for her to hide away some of her ill-gotten gains. Ideally the state keeps track of it and nails her with additional punishment if she is caught trying that.
  - conistonwater 6y ago
    > The justice system just moves slowly. Many people spend upwards of years before going to trial. This is nothing unusual. I think this is one of the things I learned from Ken White on All the President's Lawyers: we read about legal system abuse here and there and it shocks us, but even the most common normal things in the criminal justice system like how long criminal trials take can be just as shocking if only you know about them.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - ekianjo 6y ago
    > Many people spend upwards of years before going to trial. Yeah, and some like Assange spend their time in prison BEFORE their trial.
    - oldgradstudent 6y ago
      Had she tried to avoid hearings by taking refuge in the Equadorian embassy for nearly a decade, she too would have been in pretrial detention.
    - dazc 6y ago
      This common in the UK for 'anyone' accused of a serious offence.
      - permo-w 6y ago
        Yeah I’m always ready to pack up and head to the Ecuadorean Embassy
    - vkou 6y ago
      You don't have to be Assange to spend some pre-trial time in prison, if you choose to skip on your court dates.
  - goatinaboat 6y ago
    The justice system just moves slowly. Many people spend upwards of years before going to trial. This is nothing unusual. They moved pretty quick on Martin Shkreli.
    - fakedang 6y ago
      It depends on how fast they can build a case and how good the defence is. He just happened to have a lot of damning evidence against him and a pretty shit defence team, coupled with a shit PR problem in all media outlets, which made his case a toss-in.
    - ABeeSea 6y ago
      He was arrested in December 2015 and his trial started in June 2017. After appeals, he wasn’t sentenced until March 2018. Not exactly a speedy process.
  - tialaramex 6y ago
    > The justice system just moves slowly. Many people spend upwards of years before going to trial. This is nothing unusual. You can demand it goes faster. In the US this is specifically the "speedy trial" provision of the Sixth Amendment. The government is obliged to provide "speedy trial" if demanded - if it can't do that it isn't entitled to a trial at all. However, your lawyers (and she can afford good ones) will almost invariably advise you not to do that unless things have gotten entirely out of hand - because speedy trial applies to both sides, and the prosecution will have the rough outline of their case before they even file charges, so unless you're in a hurry t go to prison...
  - runako 6y ago
    > Many people spend upwards of years before going to trial. Slight hijack, but this is a key reason behind the movement to abolish cash bail. The thrust of the argument is essentially that people with more financial resources can pay bail. Those without those resources cannot, so the pre-trial period is often a de facto prison sentence whose length is unknown in advance. This setup obviously results in a tiered justice system. There are ~500k people in jail who are innocent under the law. The elimination of cash bail is intended to eliminate this disparity.
    - colejohnson66 6y ago
      The problem is that if you remove it, what do you replace it with? A judge making the decision if you’re released or jailed awaiting trial. For me, that’s fine, but for some people, that’s not (despite the judge in the current situation setting the bail amount). <rant> You end up with things like California’s SB-10 (thankfully overturned by Prop 25[0]) that would’ve replaced it by a risk assessment “AI” black box.[a] [a]: SB-10 would supposedly have required “tools [that] shall be demonstrated by scientific research to be accurate and reliable”. But what science? Crime statistics says black people commit more crimes, but some claims that those numbers are the result of overpolicing. Who’s right? [0]: https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_25,_Replace_Cash_Bail_with_Risk_Assessments_Referendum_(2020) https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_25,_Replace_C...
      - runako 6y ago
        I'm an engineer so this is not an area where I am an expert. But recognizing that we have a system that is openly biased against people without financial resources seems like something we should change. I understand that DC rarely uses cash bail and has a 40+ year track record showing that 90% of accused show for their trial dates and > 90% are not re-arrested before trial. So maybe since that system seems to work for the most part, we could use that as a basis? Or at least require a very strong burden of proof before we presume people guilty because they are not wealthy? How much better is the cash bail system at producing defendants at trial than DC's system? Is it so much better that it's worth ignoring our Constitution? If nothing else, we spend ~$17B incarcerating innocent (again, per our law) people. Seems like an incredible waste of money and human potential. Maybe we try something else.
- wombatpm 6y ago
  Still the possibility of a pardon.
- ABeeSea 6y ago
  The wheels of justice move slow. The timelines of their cases aren’t that different and Holmes’s case is both clear-cut and amazingly complex. Aaron was arrested in Jan 2011 and died Jan 2013 before his trial started and after being offered a plea deal of 6 month in low security. His trial never started and I can’t find if it was ever scheduled when I do a google search. Holmes was arrested in June 2018 and her trial was originally scheduled for March 2021 but delayed until July. Her pre-trial hearings start in two weeks.
- ashtonkem 6y ago
  Complex trials take a long time, and prosecutors often use pretrial detention as a tool to coerce defendants to waive their right to a speedy trial.
  - oldgradstudent 6y ago
    Not in this case, though. Or am I missing anything?
  - TheRealDunkirk 6y ago
    > Complex trials take a long time Especially when you're dealing with the defendants purposely scuttling evidence of a highly technical nature. The court will not treat this lightly.
- rtkwe 6y ago
  Corporate trials always take a long time because of the a) the amount of evidence created at a corporation of any reasonable size is huge, b) rich people can afford good lawyers who can gum up any process and c) the laws are written such that the person actually knew/participated in whatever crime they're being charged with. (A) and then (C) is where a lot of time can be wasted and if the executive was being crafty about 'not knowing' and only getting the good news officially it can be tricky to prove they actually knew they were lying.
- Shivetya 6y ago
  I read awhile back that there was the equivalent of sixteen million pages of evidence. There have of course been the attempts to throw it all out and Holmes has tried to play the victim; she may actually believe she is; in hopes it all lands on her business partner which leads us to her getting married. part to maintain her lifestyle she was used to during Theranos's time at the top and part to make her more appealing to any jury and doubly so if she can get on stand pregnant. her court appearances that have pictures usually show her without makeup and fancy clothing. So the question then is, sociopath or Psychopath? Probably the former from the assumption of the victimhood
- surfingdino 6y ago
  It is a high-profile case. Careers will be made and destroyed on the back of it. The legal team want to get their ducks in a row, because it involves government agencies and wealthy investors who will be asked a lot of inconvenient questions about their role (like "why didn't you act sooner?", "why did you invest in that company?") I think it's a mix of prudence, an overloaded justice system, and the pandemic that slow this down.
- Netcob 6y ago
  You can't sue a husband and wife for the same crime!
- BugsJustFindMe 6y ago
  If you get married, give your spouse lots of gifts, and then get divorced, can the state take the gifts away from the spouse?
- spamizbad 6y ago
  Given her station in society she is granted a measure of elite impunity... but it's not absolute. She likely won't face that harsh of a penalty when she finally goes to trial. If she got too harsh a sentence it would reflect poorly on those who supported her.
neya 6y ago
I am strongly determined to believe that justice systems around the world are either of the two: 1. Incompetent 2. Corrupt I do not wish to accuse of either yet in this case, but this seems grossly unfair to what people like Aaron Swartz had to go through in comparison. I guess deep pockets if involved somehow have their cases either dragged on, turned away, justice never served at all. Consistently.
- ineedasername 6y ago
  The two key defendants are facing up to 20 years in prison, they haven't gotten away with things. If the case has dragged on it's because, as this article shows, Theranos may have engaged in additional criminal activity destroying evidence. I also wouldn't call the justice system incompetent in this matter just because the computer forensic team could not crack the encryption used.
  - alistairSH 6y ago
    The difference is wealth buys you out of pre-trial detention and other mistreatment by "the system" prior to conviction.
- f430 6y ago
  "For my friends everything, for my enemies the law"
  - doonesbury 6y ago
    An outstanding one-liner. Where/who's it from?
    - mewse 6y ago
      It’s generally attributed to Óscar R. Benavides, the 45th and 49th president of Peru, (1913-1914, terminated by a coup, then 1933-1939) although I haven’t been able to find good references pointing at exactly when or in what context he used the line. More details and further references on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Óscar_R._Benavides https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Óscar_R._Benavides
trhway 6y ago
"cleaned the server with a cloth"
andromeduck 6y ago
Not trying to glorify the fraud in any way but I still wonder if she would have made it in an alternate universe where covid happened a year earlier. The optics for the regulators would be completely different and more akin to going after Elon right now.
- CerealFounder 6y ago
  Probably not. The morale of the story was she was good at collecting people with clout who simultaneously knew nothing about her business. Even in their earliest days, the outside was screaming "literally impossible" from all sides. iirc, there is even a historic thread on HN where if you go back to the comments, its mostly people proving that there is almost certain fraud behind the scenes.
  - ksd482 6y ago
    Perhaps some threads linked in this thread will lead to the thread you are talking about: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22156371 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22156371
  - cat199 6y ago
    > simultaneously knew nothing about her business. ... they new the business was convincing enough to get a contract for blood testing with CVS, effectively lining it up to be a direct beneficiary of a not-insignificant portion of ACA funds for several years until the fraud came to the surface in my view, holmes and the blood testing device are just the patsy/'fall guy' story - it's the higher up relations in connection with getting the CVS contracts that should be getting investigated
    - CerealFounder 6y ago
      Im a pretty well known founder and I cant stress enough, the higher up you get the less people know whats happening holistically. Observationally I think it's a product of the fact that managers who get to the top are so dialed to the politics and daily reality of the role (its how they reached the top of the mountain), that theyre very brittle to all the other details of their world. I think this happens all the time and her cardinal sin was courting national press in a space that kills people while committing fraud.
stevebmark 6y ago
Theranos paid this company "IncRev", and their CEO Shekar Chandrasekaran, $159,000/mo to host a database for them? That's an impressive scam! I wonder if it's money laundering or paying off friends, since any mildly competent technologist in the company would laugh them out of the room.
- silexia 6y ago
  I've heard industry people tell of government contracts paying $300,000 a month to provide "support" for a WordPress site. They didn't get a single support request for over a year.
  - kilroy123 6y ago
    Where and how can I get such a gig!?
    - selimthegrim 6y ago
      I hear the State Department CMS might have some openings...
- Scoundreller 6y ago
  They weren't paying for a database, they were paying to be forgotten.
- dmix 6y ago
  Nothing worse than Janet Yellen getting paid $500k speaker fees to talk to Citadel and a long list of other Wall St companies she will soon be directly regulating at the treasury dept. She wasn’t getting paid the $7M total because of her deep interesting take on markets. They wanted direct access to the power players and to see how their mind works. This revolving door with industry and policy makers gets a very uncritical eye by the media (especially compared to other frivolous background details) and obviously by the self morality of the participant speakers themselves. I personally hope Chandrasekaran gets in trouble for hiding evidence. But nepotism and conflicts of interest seem to be super common in the upper tiers of industry and politics, which Theranos famously surrounded themselves with, right down to their board of directors being politicians and ex generals.
curiousllama 6y ago
Seeing a lot of comments about how the justice system sucks. But... isn't prosecuting people who destroy evidence exactly what should be happening? Bad person does bad thing > prosecuted Bad person tries to hide bad thing > prosecuted for that too As far as I can tell, this is what a good justice system looks like.
t_minus_3 6y ago
never thought you can use SQL and blood together in a sentence and that too together. "SQL blood test - FTW !!"
- deathanatos 6y ago
  Because one would normally word it as "blood test SQL database" or "SQL database containing blood tests"…
pdevr 6y ago
'"The reality, however, was that for one set of tests, the failure rate was 51.3 per cent. What does that mean? Prosecutors explain: “In other words, Theranos’s TT3 blood test results were so inaccurate, it was essentially a coin toss whether the patient was getting the right result. The data was devastating.”' Slightly worse than a coin toss, even after accounting for the inherent bias in a flipped coin :-)
- corty 6y ago
  It would have become more accurate, had they inverted the results...
- ballenf 6y ago
  If it’s 100% accurate 49 out 100 times and 50% accurate for the rest, the net is more like 75% accurate. Right?
  - the_jeremy 6y ago
    "51% failure rate" doesn't mean "100% accurate 49% of the time, and 50% accurate 51% of the time", it means "right 49% of the time, wrong 51% of the time" - a coin toss.
lakesta 6y ago
Read this as, "Thanos destroyed subpoenaed SQL blood test database, prosecutors say" and thought, yea that makes sense -- Thanos would totally do that. Turns out they're not different.
sjg007 6y ago
I think if you destroy evidence then you not only get charged with that but also the jury is instructed to consider that evidence as indicative of guilt.
ljp_206 6y ago
How is Theranos still functioning in any capacity whatsoever? it feels like they are the closest thing to a real life Umbrella Corporation that I can't imagine anyone would want to work for - unless they were getting paid to wrap up things and send them for depositions as a contractor.

342 points by samizdis 6y ago

How has Elizabeth still not had her trial?!It keeps getting pushed back.. and more surprising, she got married in 2019 while awaiting trial?! Does that expose her new husband to financial liability from the fraud lawsuit?

f430 6y ago
The law is made for the rest of us. It doesn't apply to these folks. Not when your daddy knows Kissinger and other big shots.
- permo-w 6y ago
  Kissinger is 97. I was shocked he’s even still alive
colejohnson66 6y ago
It doesn’t have to do with her wealth (although that does give her better lawyers). The justice system just moves slowly. Many people spend upwards of years before going to trial. This is nothing unusual. And getting married while awaiting trial is allowed because the accused hasn’t been convicted (hence, accused). (see edit below) What would be unusual is for the charges to be reduced or even dropped. But, as it stands, she’s facing 20 years in prison. Possibly more after this incident. EDIT: I wasn’t saying she wouldn’t be allowed to get married post-conviction. I was saying that, even if the right to marriage was removed when convicted, she’s still not convicted.
- thaumasiotes 6y ago
  > And getting married while awaiting trial is allowed because the accused hasn’t been convicted (hence, accused). That's wrong; getting married while awaiting trial is allowed in the same way that getting married before being charged is allowed, and getting married after being convicted is allowed. The surprising thing is not that she was "allowed" to get married. Everyone is. The surprising thing is that someone was willing to marry her.
  - colejohnson66 6y ago
    (see my edit about my wording re: getting married) > The surprising thing is not that she was "allowed" to get married. Everyone is. The surprising thing is that someone was willing to marry her. People marry serial killers more often that one would want to believe. Just do a search for “serial killers married in prison” and you’ll see “top-10” clickbait lists on almost every result. Some people are just crazy and idolize convicts. Someone marrying Holmes is nothing novel. Maybe they were attracted to her psychopathic personality? That happens sometimes.
    - petra 6y ago
      Is she really psychopathic ? Many CEO's and entrepreneurs don't care about ethics. There's something about that career that does that to people. But that's quite different than being a psychopath like a serial killer is.
      - vmception 6y ago
        > There's something about that career that does that to people. (Something about the people that the career enables and only sometimes makes visible)
        dmix 6y ago
        Indeed, this is a great example of a fallacy like survivors bias, where you only hear about a tiny percentage of cases because of x, which makes for a poor representation of the entire population. The vast majority of our interaction with CEO behaviour is via true crime stories and exceptional rare cases. I see Bill Gates and Steve Jobs as rare cases of an executives playing a huge role in their companies but I could list off countless billion dollar company CEOs people have ever heard of, let alone 99%+ companies are small/medium sized, many companies aren’t even public, countless play a much smaller and far more boring role, etc etc.
        modo_mario 6y ago
- Blahah 6y ago
  I don't understand why getting married while awaiting trial is weird, nor why it makes a difference whether you've been convicted. You can get married before or after being convicted, in prison or otherwise. Criminal convictions don't affect your ability to get married.
  - josefx 6y ago
    It might open up ways for her to hide away some of her ill-gotten gains. Ideally the state keeps track of it and nails her with additional punishment if she is caught trying that.
- conistonwater 6y ago
  > The justice system just moves slowly. Many people spend upwards of years before going to trial. This is nothing unusual. I think this is one of the things I learned from Ken White on All the President's Lawyers: we read about legal system abuse here and there and it shocks us, but even the most common normal things in the criminal justice system like how long criminal trials take can be just as shocking if only you know about them.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- ekianjo 6y ago
  > Many people spend upwards of years before going to trial. Yeah, and some like Assange spend their time in prison BEFORE their trial.
  - oldgradstudent 6y ago
    Had she tried to avoid hearings by taking refuge in the Equadorian embassy for nearly a decade, she too would have been in pretrial detention.
  - dazc 6y ago
    This common in the UK for 'anyone' accused of a serious offence.
    - permo-w 6y ago
      Yeah I’m always ready to pack up and head to the Ecuadorean Embassy
  - vkou 6y ago
    You don't have to be Assange to spend some pre-trial time in prison, if you choose to skip on your court dates.
- goatinaboat 6y ago
  The justice system just moves slowly. Many people spend upwards of years before going to trial. This is nothing unusual. They moved pretty quick on Martin Shkreli.
  - fakedang 6y ago
    It depends on how fast they can build a case and how good the defence is. He just happened to have a lot of damning evidence against him and a pretty shit defence team, coupled with a shit PR problem in all media outlets, which made his case a toss-in.
  - ABeeSea 6y ago
    He was arrested in December 2015 and his trial started in June 2017. After appeals, he wasn’t sentenced until March 2018. Not exactly a speedy process.
- tialaramex 6y ago
  > The justice system just moves slowly. Many people spend upwards of years before going to trial. This is nothing unusual. You can demand it goes faster. In the US this is specifically the "speedy trial" provision of the Sixth Amendment. The government is obliged to provide "speedy trial" if demanded - if it can't do that it isn't entitled to a trial at all. However, your lawyers (and she can afford good ones) will almost invariably advise you not to do that unless things have gotten entirely out of hand - because speedy trial applies to both sides, and the prosecution will have the rough outline of their case before they even file charges, so unless you're in a hurry t go to prison...
- runako 6y ago
  > Many people spend upwards of years before going to trial. Slight hijack, but this is a key reason behind the movement to abolish cash bail. The thrust of the argument is essentially that people with more financial resources can pay bail. Those without those resources cannot, so the pre-trial period is often a de facto prison sentence whose length is unknown in advance. This setup obviously results in a tiered justice system. There are ~500k people in jail who are innocent under the law. The elimination of cash bail is intended to eliminate this disparity.
  - colejohnson66 6y ago
    The problem is that if you remove it, what do you replace it with? A judge making the decision if you’re released or jailed awaiting trial. For me, that’s fine, but for some people, that’s not (despite the judge in the current situation setting the bail amount). <rant> You end up with things like California’s SB-10 (thankfully overturned by Prop 25[0]) that would’ve replaced it by a risk assessment “AI” black box.[a] [a]: SB-10 would supposedly have required “tools [that] shall be demonstrated by scientific research to be accurate and reliable”. But what science? Crime statistics says black people commit more crimes, but some claims that those numbers are the result of overpolicing. Who’s right? [0]: https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_25,_Replace_Cash_Bail_with_Risk_Assessments_Referendum_(2020) https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_25,_Replace_C...
    - runako 6y ago
      I'm an engineer so this is not an area where I am an expert. But recognizing that we have a system that is openly biased against people without financial resources seems like something we should change. I understand that DC rarely uses cash bail and has a 40+ year track record showing that 90% of accused show for their trial dates and > 90% are not re-arrested before trial. So maybe since that system seems to work for the most part, we could use that as a basis? Or at least require a very strong burden of proof before we presume people guilty because they are not wealthy? How much better is the cash bail system at producing defendants at trial than DC's system? Is it so much better that it's worth ignoring our Constitution? If nothing else, we spend ~$17B incarcerating innocent (again, per our law) people. Seems like an incredible waste of money and human potential. Maybe we try something else.
wombatpm 6y ago
Still the possibility of a pardon.
ABeeSea 6y ago
The wheels of justice move slow. The timelines of their cases aren’t that different and Holmes’s case is both clear-cut and amazingly complex. Aaron was arrested in Jan 2011 and died Jan 2013 before his trial started and after being offered a plea deal of 6 month in low security. His trial never started and I can’t find if it was ever scheduled when I do a google search. Holmes was arrested in June 2018 and her trial was originally scheduled for March 2021 but delayed until July. Her pre-trial hearings start in two weeks.
ashtonkem 6y ago
Complex trials take a long time, and prosecutors often use pretrial detention as a tool to coerce defendants to waive their right to a speedy trial.
- oldgradstudent 6y ago
  Not in this case, though. Or am I missing anything?
- TheRealDunkirk 6y ago
  > Complex trials take a long time Especially when you're dealing with the defendants purposely scuttling evidence of a highly technical nature. The court will not treat this lightly.
rtkwe 6y ago
Corporate trials always take a long time because of the a) the amount of evidence created at a corporation of any reasonable size is huge, b) rich people can afford good lawyers who can gum up any process and c) the laws are written such that the person actually knew/participated in whatever crime they're being charged with. (A) and then (C) is where a lot of time can be wasted and if the executive was being crafty about 'not knowing' and only getting the good news officially it can be tricky to prove they actually knew they were lying.
Shivetya 6y ago
I read awhile back that there was the equivalent of sixteen million pages of evidence. There have of course been the attempts to throw it all out and Holmes has tried to play the victim; she may actually believe she is; in hopes it all lands on her business partner which leads us to her getting married. part to maintain her lifestyle she was used to during Theranos's time at the top and part to make her more appealing to any jury and doubly so if she can get on stand pregnant. her court appearances that have pictures usually show her without makeup and fancy clothing. So the question then is, sociopath or Psychopath? Probably the former from the assumption of the victimhood
surfingdino 6y ago
It is a high-profile case. Careers will be made and destroyed on the back of it. The legal team want to get their ducks in a row, because it involves government agencies and wealthy investors who will be asked a lot of inconvenient questions about their role (like "why didn't you act sooner?", "why did you invest in that company?") I think it's a mix of prudence, an overloaded justice system, and the pandemic that slow this down.
Netcob 6y ago
You can't sue a husband and wife for the same crime!
BugsJustFindMe 6y ago
If you get married, give your spouse lots of gifts, and then get divorced, can the state take the gifts away from the spouse?
spamizbad 6y ago
Given her station in society she is granted a measure of elite impunity... but it's not absolute. She likely won't face that harsh of a penalty when she finally goes to trial. If she got too harsh a sentence it would reflect poorly on those who supported her.

neya 6y ago

I am strongly determined to believe that justice systems around the world are either of the two: 1. Incompetent 2. Corrupt I do not wish to accuse of either yet in this case, but this seems grossly unfair to what people like Aaron Swartz had to go through in comparison. I guess deep pockets if involved somehow have their cases either dragged on, turned away, justice never served at all. Consistently.

ineedasername 6y ago
The two key defendants are facing up to 20 years in prison, they haven't gotten away with things. If the case has dragged on it's because, as this article shows, Theranos may have engaged in additional criminal activity destroying evidence. I also wouldn't call the justice system incompetent in this matter just because the computer forensic team could not crack the encryption used.
- alistairSH 6y ago
  The difference is wealth buys you out of pre-trial detention and other mistreatment by "the system" prior to conviction.
f430 6y ago
"For my friends everything, for my enemies the law"
- doonesbury 6y ago
  An outstanding one-liner. Where/who's it from?
  - mewse 6y ago
    It’s generally attributed to Óscar R. Benavides, the 45th and 49th president of Peru, (1913-1914, terminated by a coup, then 1933-1939) although I haven’t been able to find good references pointing at exactly when or in what context he used the line. More details and further references on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Óscar_R._Benavides https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Óscar_R._Benavides

trhway 6y ago

"cleaned the server with a cloth"

andromeduck 6y ago

Not trying to glorify the fraud in any way but I still wonder if she would have made it in an alternate universe where covid happened a year earlier. The optics for the regulators would be completely different and more akin to going after Elon right now.

CerealFounder 6y ago
Probably not. The morale of the story was she was good at collecting people with clout who simultaneously knew nothing about her business. Even in their earliest days, the outside was screaming "literally impossible" from all sides. iirc, there is even a historic thread on HN where if you go back to the comments, its mostly people proving that there is almost certain fraud behind the scenes.
- ksd482 6y ago
  Perhaps some threads linked in this thread will lead to the thread you are talking about: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22156371 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22156371
- cat199 6y ago
  > simultaneously knew nothing about her business. ... they new the business was convincing enough to get a contract for blood testing with CVS, effectively lining it up to be a direct beneficiary of a not-insignificant portion of ACA funds for several years until the fraud came to the surface in my view, holmes and the blood testing device are just the patsy/'fall guy' story - it's the higher up relations in connection with getting the CVS contracts that should be getting investigated
  - CerealFounder 6y ago
    Im a pretty well known founder and I cant stress enough, the higher up you get the less people know whats happening holistically. Observationally I think it's a product of the fact that managers who get to the top are so dialed to the politics and daily reality of the role (its how they reached the top of the mountain), that theyre very brittle to all the other details of their world. I think this happens all the time and her cardinal sin was courting national press in a space that kills people while committing fraud.

stevebmark 6y ago

Theranos paid this company "IncRev", and their CEO Shekar Chandrasekaran, $159,000/mo to host a database for them? That's an impressive scam! I wonder if it's money laundering or paying off friends, since any mildly competent technologist in the company would laugh them out of the room.

silexia 6y ago
I've heard industry people tell of government contracts paying $300,000 a month to provide "support" for a WordPress site. They didn't get a single support request for over a year.
- kilroy123 6y ago
  Where and how can I get such a gig!?
  - selimthegrim 6y ago
    I hear the State Department CMS might have some openings...
Scoundreller 6y ago
They weren't paying for a database, they were paying to be forgotten.
dmix 6y ago
Nothing worse than Janet Yellen getting paid $500k speaker fees to talk to Citadel and a long list of other Wall St companies she will soon be directly regulating at the treasury dept. She wasn’t getting paid the $7M total because of her deep interesting take on markets. They wanted direct access to the power players and to see how their mind works. This revolving door with industry and policy makers gets a very uncritical eye by the media (especially compared to other frivolous background details) and obviously by the self morality of the participant speakers themselves. I personally hope Chandrasekaran gets in trouble for hiding evidence. But nepotism and conflicts of interest seem to be super common in the upper tiers of industry and politics, which Theranos famously surrounded themselves with, right down to their board of directors being politicians and ex generals.

curiousllama 6y ago

Seeing a lot of comments about how the justice system sucks. But... isn't prosecuting people who destroy evidence exactly what should be happening? Bad person does bad thing > prosecuted Bad person tries to hide bad thing > prosecuted for that too As far as I can tell, this is what a good justice system looks like.

t_minus_3 6y ago

never thought you can use SQL and blood together in a sentence and that too together. "SQL blood test - FTW !!"

deathanatos 6y ago
Because one would normally word it as "blood test SQL database" or "SQL database containing blood tests"…

pdevr 6y ago

'"The reality, however, was that for one set of tests, the failure rate was 51.3 per cent. What does that mean? Prosecutors explain: “In other words, Theranos’s TT3 blood test results were so inaccurate, it was essentially a coin toss whether the patient was getting the right result. The data was devastating.”' Slightly worse than a coin toss, even after accounting for the inherent bias in a flipped coin :-)

corty 6y ago
It would have become more accurate, had they inverted the results...
ballenf 6y ago
If it’s 100% accurate 49 out 100 times and 50% accurate for the rest, the net is more like 75% accurate. Right?
- the_jeremy 6y ago
  "51% failure rate" doesn't mean "100% accurate 49% of the time, and 50% accurate 51% of the time", it means "right 49% of the time, wrong 51% of the time" - a coin toss.

lakesta 6y ago

Read this as, "Thanos destroyed subpoenaed SQL blood test database, prosecutors say" and thought, yea that makes sense -- Thanos would totally do that. Turns out they're not different.

sjg007 6y ago

I think if you destroy evidence then you not only get charged with that but also the jury is instructed to consider that evidence as indicative of guilt.

ljp_206 6y ago

How is Theranos still functioning in any capacity whatsoever? it feels like they are the closest thing to a real life Umbrella Corporation that I can't imagine anyone would want to work for - unless they were getting paid to wrap up things and send them for depositions as a contractor.