Hopefully, the Judge Will Go Medieval on Both of Them

Now that former Theranos COO Sunny Balwani has been convicted of all 12 counts that he was charged with, I am looking forward to Elizabeth Holmes’ and his sentencing in September.

Holmes was only convicted of 4 crimes, so one would expected a less time for her, which is reasonable, and even more of a difference because she is a pretty white blond woman who has had a baby since her being charged, which is not.

If you want to deter, both of them should spend many years in prison:

Former Theranos executive Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, who long served as the second-in-command to founder Elizabeth Holmes, was convicted of all 12 counts in federal court in San Jose for defrauding investors and patients connected to the biotech company, according to the Associated Press.

Balwani faced 10 counts of wire fraud, and two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, after initially being charged with his former business partner, Holmes. Balwani ended up with the tougher judgment — Holmes was convicted in January of four counts of fraud for misleading investors who poured funds into the blood testing start-up, which once promised to transform the medical diagnostics industry.

Theranos was a shining star in Silicon Valley for a more than a decade, attracting investments from seasoned techies such as Oracle’s Larry Ellison and venture capitalist Tim Draper. It boasted a star-studded board of directors that included former secretary of defense Jim Mattis and former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and George Shultz. Holmes had started the company when she was still a student at Stanford, and she captivated potential business partners, investors and media with her vision of making blood testing cheaper and less painful.

But the house of cards came tumbling down after a Wall Street Journal investigation revealed that Theranos’s technology was not working as well as the company boasted. Its small, tabletop device — sometimes called the Edison or the MiniLab — could only run about a dozen blood tests, former employees revealed in testimony during the trials — a far cry from the hundreds of tests Theranos suggested it could complete.

Some of the tests the claimed that they could perform were literally impossible, things like titers using samples so small that a normal result would have none of the material being measured.

It was clear from the start that this was a scam, and people who knew better, had to have known that this was complete bollocks, so I’d like to see some of them in the dock.

As always, the question is cui bono, and those who benefited from looking the other way need to be brought to account as well.