Elizabeth Holmes found guilty

Re:Elizabeth Holmes found guilty by necovek on Tuesday January 04, 2022 @04:30AM (#29792957)

I am neither American nor a native English speaker, but I always thought fraud was mostly a deliberate action, and negligence was mostly resulting out of either lack of action or accidental consequences of an action.

So if a company deliberately and knowingly markets a "sepsis-test" that puts out completely random results and leads to people getting their limbs amputated (bear with me, I know the example is terrible), they can only be held responsible for "negligence" by those patients? Or would patients only be able to claim financial loss due to fraudulent loss of work ability and such?

There was similar reporting of those prenatal genetic tests a few days ago (they have led to unnecessary pregnancy abortions due to incorrect results), and I wonder what corrective action we can do to ensure these things don't happen?

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Re:Elizabeth Holmes found guilty by Someone on Tuesday January 04, 2022 @07:19AM (#29793985)

I’m not a lawyer, but the Wikipedia part I quoted gives me the impression that, in US law or maybe the specific state this case was in, “fraud” is legally defined “depriving somebody of any money or property”.

Again assuming Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negligence#Procedure_in_the_Un...) has this right, negligence requires injury (“The United States generally recognizes four elements to a negligence action: duty, breach, proximate causation and injury. A plaintiff who makes a negligence claim must prove all four elements of negligence in order to win his or her case”

“Injury” may have a wider meaning in US law than elsewhere, though. Wikipedia gives me https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_injury, which says “Personal injury is a legal term for an injury to the body, mind or emotions, as opposed to an injury to property”, so properties can be injured, too, and https://dictionary.law.com/Default.aspx?selected=1646 sort-of shows that’s a synonym for “property damage”.

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Re:Elizabeth Holmes found guilty by toyg on Tuesday January 04, 2022 @06:24AM (#29793664)

Negligence is not an absolute concept, there is a scale going from accidental to willful - which is where it borders on fraud. The legal definitions around these terms are complex, because the difference between gross negligence, willful misconduct, and outright fraud, can often be philosophical more than practical. In your example, I reckon that the random tests would be considered willfully negligent.

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