The appeal of imprisoned Theranos fraudster Elizabeth Holmes is scheduled to be heard in federal court in San Francisco on Tuesday.
The notorious founding father of the now-defunct Palo Alto blood-testing startup is serving a lengthy sentence in a minimum-security Texas prison. Theranos, once valued at $9 billion, claimed its devices could run greater than a thousand tests — for the whole lot from cancer and diabetes to pregnancy and HIV infection — using just just a few drops of blood from a finger prick.
Holmes' legal team and prosecutors will argue the case at 9 a.m. within the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. She filed an appeal in late 2022, 11 months after a jury found her guilty on 4 counts of defrauding Theranos investors. She desires to have her conviction and 11-year prison sentence overturned, which might trigger a brand new trial.
Attorneys for Holmes, 40, said in a December 2022 court filing that the criminal case, which was heard in U.S. District Court in San Jose and led to guilty verdicts, was “replete with grounds for appeal.”
Those points, her legal team claimed, included alleged errors by Judge Edward Davila, who oversaw her case and trial. Holmes claimed Davila improperly allowed the jury to listen to about regulatory actions against Theranos and her company's reversal of all test results of its troubled “Edison” machines. Those events occurred after Holmes had made all “relevant” statements to investors, and the jury mustn’t have heard about them, Holmes's lawyers argued.
Holmes, a Stanford University dropout, founded Theranos in 2003 and built it right into a high-profile company backed by a few of America's richest people: Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, media mogul Rupert Murdoch and Walmart's Walton family. Theranos faced poor oversight from a board full of luminaries akin to former U.S. Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and George Shultz and former U.S. Secretaries of Defense James Mattis and William Perry.
A series of revelations within the Wall Street Journal starting in 2015 led to an investigation by U.S. federal authorities and a settlement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) through which Holmes was fined $500,000 and barred from serving as an officer or director of a publicly traded company for 10 years. In 2018, federal prosecutors charged her with fraud.
Ten months after her conviction, Davila sentenced Holmes, who has two young children with hotel heir Billy Evans, to 11 years and three months in prison. She surrendered to Camp Bryan federal prison, about 100 miles from Houston, on May 30, 2023, as U.S. Bureau of Prisons inmate number 24965-111.
Updates from the Bureau of Prisons show her sentence has been reduced by about two years and she or he is anticipated to be released in August 2032. Federal prisoners can reduce their sentence by 54 days for every year they’re incarcerated in the event that they meet behavioral standards, and so they can further reduce their sentence by completing programs to cut back recidivism and take part in “productive activities,” the bureau said.
Holmes won’t appear on the hearing in person or by video since the three-judge panel that hears oral arguments in federal court appeals is often attended only by lawyers and the court doesn’t allow for the presence of incarcerated people, a court spokesman said Tuesday.
Federal criminal complaints Success at very low pricesThat's the federal court system. If Holmes loses, she could appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, but its justices hear only about 100 to 150 appeals a yr out of the greater than 7,000 it normally has to review. accordingly the court system.
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