"I've got six bucks that says she's setting up an insanity defense."
Climateer Investing, October, 2019
She's not crazy, she's a sociopath.*From Bloomberg:
Theranos May Have Been Crazy. Holmes Probably Wasn’t.
The news that Elizabeth Holmes’s lawyers plan to present an insanity defense in her federal trial for criminal fraud is frankly astonishing.....MORE
Maybe the evidence against her is so strong that her lawyers are desperate. Or maybe they are hoping to follow a strategy of making the jury feel sympathy for her, giving them an excuse to acquit. But the reality is that it is extremely difficult for a defendant to prove insanity in federal court.
The criteria are extremely difficult to satisfy. A tougher test was adopted after outrage about the successful insanity defense of John Hinckley, the man who shot President Ronald Reagan. The statute says that a defendant can be found not guilty by showing that “at the time of the commission of the acts constituting the offense, the defendant, as a result of a severe mental disease or defect, was unable to appreciate the nature and quality or the wrongfulness of his acts.” This is an affirmative defense, which means that the defendant has to prove it to the jury by clear and convincing evidence.
The federal version of the insanity defense is sometimes called a “cognitive” test. That means it asks about the defendant’s mental state. And it bifurcates mental state into two parts: whether the defendant knew what she was doing, and whether she knew it was wrong.
The first question allows an acquittal for a defendant who literally did not know what she was doing when she committed the crime. For example, a defendant who fired a gun while believing she was actually waving hello would count as being unable to appreciate the “nature and quality” of her act. She could be acquitted under the federal definition.
I can think of no conceivable way this part of the defense could apply to Holmes. She was running a company and making public statements about her product, and certainly knew that those were the activities in which she was engaged.
The second question allows for acquittal of someone who knows what she’s doing, but doesn’t know it’s morally wrong. (Note that this doesn’t mean she was ignorant of the fact that she was violating the law. Ignorance of the law is generally not an excuse. It means, rather, that she thought there was nothing morally wrong about her conduct.)
Presumably, Holmes’s lawyers will try to maintain that she didn’t know it was wrong to deceive investors and the rest of the world about Theranos’s blood tests. Given that her lawyers are apparently going to introduce testimony from a trauma expert, it seems that they will argue that some traumatic experience in Holmes’s past caused her to believe that lying was perfectly morally acceptable....
*And on the sociopathy, way back in June 2015, four months before the WSJ's John Carryou:
"Theranos: She's Young, She's Rich, Is She A Marketing Huckster?" through January 2019's "Ex-Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes says "I don't know" 600+ times in never-before-broadcast deposition tapes
The woman is a sociopath.
January 24, 2020
"Theranos founder Holmes phones in to court hearing solo after lawyers say she stiffed them: report"
What we have here is a sociopath, something that was apparent to anyone paying attention.
From the San Jose Mercury-News, who were one of the few media outlets who never fell for the spiel:
February 11, 2020
UPDATED—"Theranos founder Holmes’ lawyer hints at trial defense in court hearing"
....An insanity plea has been our bet for the last couple years.
It would be easier in California state court but can still be successful at the Federal level as well.
February 12, 2020
"U.S. judge drops some charges against Theranos's Holmes, leaves wire fraud"
Ms. Holmes still might have to do the cray-cray eyes:
and the fake voice in court but the downside of not being able to pull it off has diminished
