HOLMES IN BOSTON OUT

 Theranos executive Elizabeth Holmes reported to federal prison on Tuesday to serve an eleven-year sentence. A few thoughts. 

Does anyone think that if she got five years, she would leave prison and return to defrauding people? 

Does anyone think people who are contemplating committing crimes really consider the sentence someone else got? In other words, is there any evidence to support the belief that prison sentences deter others? 

The problem is the public perception that prison is easy and fun and that people like Holmes who get a three or four year sentence laugh at the criminal justice system and get to keep all their stolen money. Spend a day in prison. Spend a mind-numbing week in prison and then tell us that prison is easy and joke and that prisoners laugh at it.

We of course are not trying to influence DeSantis appointed Judges (DJs). You guys just keep calling balls and strikes and keeping sending poor people of color to prison for as long as possible. Nobody expects anything else of you. 

Your Miami Heat won a game seven in Boston, becoming the second Florida team to win a game seven in Boston this year. Earlier in the playoffs the Florida Panthers won a game seven in Boston. 

Both the Panthers and the Heat are eighth seeded entries into the playoffs in their respective leagues and both of the teams are now in the finals. 

Predictions for your Florida teams? We want to hear from all of you loyal Heat and Panthers fans who supported the teams all year long and didn't just jump on the bandwagon during the playoffs. 

All five of you. 

THE GULAG

 The great beast awakens hungry. Slowly it emerges from slumber, never sleeping, always hungry. It opens its maw wide, demanding to be fed. Always hungry, eating souls, swallowing lives whole, the waste products of broken human beings emerging from its spirit crushing peristalsis. Some never leave. Death overtakes their imprisonment. Those that stumble out, vacant eyes, brains rewired with the disease of institutionalism, are zombies. Torturers and tortured, dead inside.

Elizabeth Holmes was fed to the beast on Friday. 11 1/2 years. 4,200 days. 

Consider this-  President Obama was 10 months into his first term of President 4,200 days ago. 

If Elizabeth Holmes was sentenced in November 2009, would we today be saying "yeah, that's about the right amount of time'? Would her release in 2014 or 2016 or 2018 have been an abject failure of the justice system? 

Now she faces life in the Gulag until 2033. One third of the 21th century gone. Eat when told. Read what is allowed. Think only what is approved. All on a ceaseless schedule that never changes on any day at any time for any reason. A life of endless monotony, punctured only by the daily bouts of survival. Attacks by guards or inmates or both, a constant and never ceasing source of anxiety. 

Was there a belief that if she was released in 2028 that the public would be in danger? Given her notoriety, is there any real concern that she will get out, form a new company, solicit investors with fake information? Again? 

Are there people in Silcon Valley as we speak deciding not to issue fake press releases because of her sentence yesterday? 

This is just the beast that we have created demanding to be fed. 

Nameless and faceless bureaucrats, skulking the hallways of corridors of fleeting power in Washington DC pieced together a labyrinth of rules, assigned them numbers, and reduced justice to calculators. 

Sophisticated Means? (which means using a cell phone or laptop in the commission of a crime) increase the sentence. Failure to roll over and beg for mercy? Increase the sentence. Testify in your defense (a right enshrined in our precious Constitution) and lose- increase your sentence. Of course you have rights no other person in any other country on earth has- exercise them? Increase your sentence. 

Be a lap dog. Jump when told, say what you're told to say- decrease your sentence. Don't investigate, don't file motions, don't cite the presumption of innocence- decrease your sentence. Yes, the beast must be fed, but it eats less when you bow your head as your collar is being fastened.

What happened yesterday and what happens every day to countless people in the "greatest justice system on earth" is a crime against humanity. 

The only real difference between our trials and the show trials of Iran and North Korea and Russia (ask Brittnay Griner) is that we think out shit doesn't stink. It does. It stinks just as much as any other of those countries who do what they do without hiding behind the hypocrisy of "rights".  

Best justice system on earth? You can have it. The Emperor has no clothes and we are not afraid to say so. 

IN RE ELIZABETH HOLMES

 How much is too much?

That is the subject for today's blog post. 

Elizabeth Holmes, the convicted CEO of Theranos is facing sentencing on November 18. 

The government is asking for 15 years. 

The defense - check the link- is asking for 18 months. 

So how much time is enough? 

A day in jail is awful. A year is life changing. Five years is life altering. 

Considering that the government is seeking restitution in the amount of over 800 million dollars (or roughly the salary for the Yankees starting four rotation next year) Elizabeth Holmes's life is inexorably altered for the worse. She is not keeping any of the profits of Theranos- because there were no profits. Only losses. 

So explain to us how, in 2027, after having served five years in prison, if she was released 1) people would be in danger and/or 2) CEOs would see on their Apple news feed a piece on her release and call in their top people and say  "Liz Holmes just got released. So that billion dollar fraud we were thinking about doing? It's a go. We can all do five if we have to, right?"

We cannot see a purpose for incarcerating Elizabeth Holmes for more than two years. The Court's restitution order will remain in effect for at least 20 years. 

There is no such thing as deterrence in criminal law. We have yet, in approaching forty years in the field, to meet one blessed person who has said to us something like "I was thinking of doing a pump and dump stock scheme, but then I read that decision out of the Fifth Circuit affirming the 134 month sentence, and I just decided I couldn't do the 11 plus years."

It is not as if Holmes will get out of prison, rub her hands together, twirl her moustache, and ask her cohorts if they know about any widows whose investment accounts they can plunder. 

There needs to be sanity brought back into federal white collar fraud sentencing. There is however, very little hope on the horizon. People who are emotionally involved in these matters scream at the press "she got away with it" if her sentence is not death. 

And that's the problem. Congress responds to those apocryphal stories more than it does sentencing and recidivism data. 

So we think the over/under is 120 months and we are betting over. Because when the US government can squash you like a bug on a windshield and send you to our gulags, they do so, trumpeting due process all along the way.