Skip to main content

Elizabeth Holmes is going to stay in prison

 







The last notes of the Theranos melody have sounded.  The symphony is over and the audience is heading home. That is what it feels like to see this headline:

Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes loses fraud appeal.  (BBC).

Theranos was a huge story in the business world in the period 2014-2018, in the rise and fall of its claims to revolutionize healthcare tech. 

It was a big story in the world of crime and punishment in the period that followed its collapse, ending with the conviction of Theranos founder Holmes and her sentencing in the US district court for northern California in November 2022 for a little over 11 years. 

In the two and a quarter years since, though, the world of constant short news cycles has passed her by. So it comes as a bit of a nostalgic trip to be reminded of the particulars by the circuit court's denial of her appeal in recent days. 

The appeal contained the usual range of evidentiary issues -- some things were allowed in the evidence that should have been excluded, other things were excluded that should have been allowed, to hear the defense tell it.  For example, Holmes' lawyers wanted to enter evidence that her co-defendant and one-time romantic interest, Sunny Balwani, had said that he "owned" the business model. That would have bolstered her "it was all Balwanis fault" defense. 

The appeals court was unimpressed. And that is the right answer. As is this --

The moving finger writes, and having writ

Moves on, nor all your piety nor wit

Can lure it back to cancel half a line.

Nor all your tears wash out a word of it. 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...
24 comments
Read more

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...
10 comments
Read more

The Growing Block Theory of Time

My own disposition, in regard to the philosophy of time, is toward the "growing block" theory. This is the view that past events remain realities, that present-moment events are also realities, but that future events are not yet real. The image is of the universe as a block with an edge on (say) the right-hand side. The block is expanding because that edge is moving ever further right, and that edge is what we call the present, or, simply, "now." Everything to the left of that edge is both static (the past is complete) and, still and forever, real. Think of the phrase "the moving finger writes." The chief alternatives to the growing-block theory are "presentism" (only the now-edge itself is real) and "eternalism" (past, present, and future are all real." I believe that time is a growing block because (1) that's what it feels like, (2) we should stick with the introspective phenomenon unless we have good reason to abandon ...
8 comments
Read more