Whether she goes to prison or not, I don't understand how people have such sympathy for a CEO who drove her top researcher to suicide. If that happened in a movie critics would complain about the unbelievable mustache-twirling caricature.
Of course no one is going to come out and admit that Ian Gibbons's suicide was caused by anything other than the "health and other problems" insinuated by Theranos's PR flack. Also we have to treat every suicide as a tragic failure of mental healthcare availability, rather than (occasionally) a rational reaction to intolerable circumstances.
Gibbons was a top biochemist, hired away from academia with the copious combination of sunshine and VC cash that has long been Holmes's specialty. He staked a decade of his life and reputation on making the impossible real, because that's what she hired him to do. By his own words, he failed in that task. Then he committed suicide.
I don't know anything about Gibbons or his suicide. Going off of what you said though, just because he failed at the (impossible) job he was hired to do and committed suicide doesn't mean Holmes "drove him to commit suicide." He may have been working under immense pressure. At the same time, he most likely knew the difficulty of his task when he accepted the job. He was, after all, a top biochemist. Right?
Probably most people could justify a failed six-month project to themselves with, "you live, you learn". A decade of one's "most productive years" hurts quite a bit more. That decade looks a lot different in retrospect than it did when Holmes was selling it.
I'm not saying I would have done the same, in the same position. Then again, if I were the type to feel such a failure so keenly, I'd be more likely to be a top biochemist in the first place. Both parties were adults. The point of this thread is that Holmes ought to be treated as such.
I have a theory of suicide, don't know what actual psychiatry says about it. But it seems to me that some patterns in suicide that defy simple notions of privilege may be explained by impossible expectations.
White Americans kill themselves more often than Black Americans, but Native Americans more than whites again. Some very rich groups (e.g. Hollywood stars and their kids) kill themselves often, but also some extremely poor groups (Indian subsistence farmers - possibly in connection to microcredit).
If I'm correct, the sexism of lower expectations may be a contributing factor why women kill themselves less than men, and the racism of low expectations has a similar effect on blacks.
Native Americans, on the other hand, may be more or less as socially disadvantaged as blacks in the US (correct me if I am wrong), but grow up with romanticised notions of themselves from majority culture and (First-)nationalist idealization from their own, creating an image it's especially hard to live up to from social and economic deprivation.
Celebrities have a lot of economic and social opportunity, but also everyone knows they have it, and everyone's eyes are on them. Expectations are accordingly high.
And for the poor subsistence farmers, there's nothing like a debt letter to say "you should be doing this, why aren't you doing this?". Before, they might have starved, but at least it wouldn't be their fault. Now there's a formal legal document saying that it basically is, and the entire village is involved in pushing that lesson in (if I understand microcredit practices correctly).
You call suicide an occasionally rational reaction. I'm not sure if I agree, but it does remind me of a bug I had in a connect four program many years ago. It could look ahead four-five moves or so, but it had a poor evaluation function, so it would often find itself in situations where the opponent could force a win. When it did, it played randomly. I had forgotten to penalize an early loss over a late loss, so every move seemed equally bad to it. Maybe for some suicidal people, similarly all outcomes seem 100% unacceptable, and so suicide just becomes one random equally bad option out of many.
