Can't tell if serious. Can you see how the second might be seen as worse than the first? Literally perverse incentives.
"Go big or go home" and no worries! Couple years in Federal summer camp and you go back to your cushy upper class lifestyle as a consultant or startup advisor, or "executive coaching" for other future/wannabe scammers
You may not like it but that is in fact the letter of the law. The letter does not get bent to produce the outcome that feels more fair or just. To do so is to abandon the principle of rule of law to begin with. You probably should learn at some point, the legal system is basically a pedantic genie interpreting 3 wishes. "oh I wish the 3 strikes law applied to people like Holmes as well." "Granted".
I'm flatly amazed they couldn't prove anybody died as a result of her deliberate greed-fueled negligence in providing fake medical test results. She should be charged with manslaughter.
I think this is harder to prove than you'd think. You can't just prove that Theranos did a blood test and someone died, you'd have to prove that if Theranos did their jobs correctly that person would have survived.
It ends up being a long chain of probabilities. Would the real test have shown a false negative? Would the treatment have definitely cured them (given that most treatments aren't 100% effective)? Would they have even sought treatment? Etc, etc.
It's kind of like how if a substance ends up causing cancer it's very hard to prove that an individual got cancer from that substance. You can see the effect in aggregate, but at an individual level it's very hard to prove they got it from this substance instead of pollution or smoking or eating too much meat or flying or whatever.
This is the same. You can say in aggregate that the patients would have lived longer with accurate tests, but it's hard to say what an individual outcome would have been.
Is each individual investment over $5k? By letter of the law, you can steal $25 a million times, or $25 million one time, but you better not steal $5k three times.
But did she steal more than 5k more than once. As written, you can steal $25 a million times and the law does not apply. You can steal $25 million one time and the law does not apply.
"Go big or go home" and no worries! Couple years in Federal summer camp and you go back to your cushy upper class lifestyle as a consultant or startup advisor, or "executive coaching" for other future/wannabe scammers