According to a court, Elizabeth Holmes must report to jail on April 27 as scheduled. She was not permitted to remain free on bond while she appealed her fraud conviction, though, by the judge.
US District Judge Edward Davila rendered a decision in Holmes’ lawsuit on Monday in San Jose, California. Since Holmes was accused of a crime in 2018, he has been working on the case. He’s probably going to stop here. Davila oversaw the founder of Theranos Inc.’s four-month trial in 2021. She was given an 11 and a half year prison sentence in November for misleading investors about her blood-testing company.
Experts in the law said it was unlikely that Holmes could stay free during the appeals process, which could take up to two years. She will probably again ask the federal appeals court in San Francisco for bail. She has also asked this court to throw out her sentence.
Davila said that even if Holmes won an appeals court ruling that faulted him for letting evidence at trial that questioned the accuracy and reliability of Theranos’ technology, she had lied to investors in so many different ways that she probably wouldn’t need a reversal or new trial on all the fraud counts she was found guilty of.
“Whether the jury heard more or less evidence that tended to show how accurate and reliable Theranos’s technology was doesn’t change the fact that the jury heard evidence that Ms. Holmes had made other false claims to investors,” he wrote.
Seth Kretzer, a criminal defense attorney who is not involved in the case, said that Holmes has little to no chance at the appeals court. He said that Davila “bullet-proofed” her conviction by giving her lawyers a lot of room to make her full defense. This is why it took so long to try her.
Holmes said she needed bail because she has two young children, is still working on new inventions, and raised “substantial questions” in her appeal that could get her a new trial. But, at a hearing last month, Davila was most interested in what the prosecutors said about the possibility that Holmes might try to get away. They said this because while Holmes was on trial, she bought a one-way plane ticket to Mexico.
Holmes’s lawyer said that she and Billy Evans had planned to go to a wedding in the hopes that she would be found not guilty and they could take a long trip with no set date to come back.
In the end, Monday’s choice was not affected by the plane ticket.
Lance Wade and Kevin Downey, Holmes’s lawyers, didn’t answer emails about the ruling sent outside of normal business hours, right away.
Elizabeth Holmes wants to get out of her “unfair” sentence
In 2018, Holmes, the former president of Theranos, Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, and her ex-boyfriend were all charged with multiple counts of wire fraud. Investors who invested money into the company and heard it had a revolutionary new way to test a small amount of blood quickly and accurately were said to have been scammed.
Holmes was found guilty on four counts and sentenced to 11.25 years in prison and three years of state supervision. In November of last year, this happened.
On April 27, Holmes, who is 39 years old, will start doing her time. She asked the judge to let her stay free while she appealed her conviction, but the judge said no. Holmes told the judge that she was “devastated by my failures” and “felt deep pain for what people had to go through because I failed them.” Holmes’s defense team also said that testimony from Theranos’s former lab director, Dr. Adam Rosendorff, that the company’s technology was “uniquely problematic” improperly influenced the court. They said this because Rosendorff needed to be questioned about problems in other labs where he worked.
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Because of these things, Holmes’s lawyers wrote, the court “should overturn the conviction and remand for a new trial or remand for a new sentence.”
In the past year, Holmes has tried repeatedly to get her conviction overturned, her sentence delayed, or her sentence lessened. First, her lawyers asked the judge to throw out her conviction in May, saying there wasn’t enough evidence for any “rational juror” to believe it. Then, in November, after the judge denied her three requests for a new trial just days before she was sentenced, she asked for 18 months of house arrest instead of prison time, saying that she had been “mocked and vilified” enough.
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Elizabeth Holmes is asking a judge to reverse her ‘unjust’ conviction
