[colejohnson66]

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]

> 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]

(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.

[shubb]

I think that the surprise here was more about the financials than the morals. Depending on state, after you marry you become liable for your partners debts, and the property you came into the marriage with may become common property that can be siezed to pay them.

So if she gets fined or successfully sued, the husband could find himself with a wife he can't see for 20 years and a big line of creditors taking all his assets and future earnings.

[petra]

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.

[phobosanomaly]

At the very least she's extremely manipulative. She faked her voice in public for years. That's next-level dedication.

Although, after reading Bad Blood, David Boies and his law firm came across as one of the scarier characters in the whole thing. Theranos' lawyers were completely willing to terrify and intimidate anyone who got in the way of their fraud.

[bartread]

> She faked her voice in public for years.

Maggie Thatcher did a similar thing, lowering her voice to make herself sound more authoritative. She managed to pull it off reasonably well I think. Possibly the fact that she was a bit older at the time helped.

I never understood why Elizabeth Holmes persisted though because, in her case, it mostly made her sound incredibly odd, and actually quite difficult and unpleasant to listen to. This may have been due to some sort of uncanny valley effect: the disconnect between Holmes' youthful and almost dainty appearance, and her weirdly boomy void giving her a sense of the unreal. The result to me was that it undermined her authority and credibility rather than enhancing them.

Still, as you say, next-level dedication.

[ahelwer]

It's actually very common for women professionals to use a lower register when speaking to colleagues. People take them more seriously; they notice. I have several friends who do this.

[Fnoord]

I read that book. I came across that Boies fellow at other times, too. SCO vs IBM. But also while reading Catch and Kill by Ronan Farrow (about Harvey Weinstein).

He appears to be of the 1% group.

[thaumasiotes]

> She faked her voice in public for years. That's next-level dedication.

She spoke at an artificially low pitch. This isn't exactly unheard of; almost all Japanese women speak at an artificially high pitch.

[ModernMech]

Psychopathy is not limited to serial killers. Psychopathy is prevalent in about 1 in 100. If 1/100 people were serial killers, we'd have a big problem on our hands.

In reality, psychopaths blend into society very well. You likely know a few and wouldn't even suspect them unless you know what to look for. They find their way into positions that are highly competitive, where their lack of empathy serves them well. Psychopaths are overrepresented as surgeons, lawyers, bankers, law enforcement (you'll find a lot of psychopaths behind bars, but you'll also find a lot keeping them there), politicians, and yes CEOs.

[vmception]

> 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]

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]

I imagine we do hear about more such cases because there simply are more of them compared to other groups we hear about.

There's been some notable studies by now that concluded the amount of psychopaths is way higher among CEO's than the average population and that it isn't that exceptionally rare among this subgroup as you said.

[warent]

There's a mind bending TED Talk on this which really opened my mind on this topic: https://youtu.be/xYemnKEKx0c

I highly recommend checking it out. In my opinion it is one of the greatest talks of all time and it gave me goosebumps. But if you are really busy, a summary is that everyone has varying degrees of psychopathy that make a gray area in between extreme labels.

[Ecstatify]

The Dropout podcast sheds a lot of light on the entire situation.

[hannob]

Not the most unusual story you'll find. Carlos the Jackal got married in prison, his lawyer is his wife.

This is surprising on so many levels. He'll likely spend the rest of his life in prison. He was a ruthless killer. And his treatment of women is well documented and... not flattering.

[Glawen]

there are women writing to prison asking to marry serial killer who killed women in awful circumstances. I fail to understand this, but it happens...

[SilasX]

If your model deems it impossible that she’d get married, that is a problem with your model, not (just) with her groom.

[bpodgursky]

It would be incredibly dark as a legal defense, but given her sorta sociopathy, I wonder if she has calculated that being married and having a child before sentencing would make the judge or jury give a more lenient sentence.

Tbh, even knowing that it's a 100% calculated move, I would personally as a juror have a much harder time sentencing a woman with a young child to significant prison time.

[Asparagirl]

This is also a plot point in the Broadway musical (and its movie adaptation) “Chicago”. It even gets a great song, full of double entendres, “My Baby and Me”.

[conistonwater]

> 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.

[ekianjo]

> Many people spend upwards of years before going to trial.

Yeah, and some like Assange spend their time in prison BEFORE their trial.

[oldgradstudent]

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.

[vkou]

You don't have to be Assange to spend some pre-trial time in prison, if you choose to skip on your court dates.

[dazc]

This common in the UK for 'anyone' accused of a serious offence.

[permo-w]

Yeah I’m always ready to pack up and head to the Ecuadorean Embassy

[tialaramex]

> 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...

[Blahah]

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]

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.

[runako]

> 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]

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_C...

[runako]

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.

[goatinaboat]

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.

[ABeeSea]

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.

[fakedang]

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.