Elizabeth Holmes, founder of Theranos I won’t do it tomorrow he will head to prison to begin serving an 11-year sentence, as first reported by the WSJ. Although US District Court Judge Edward Davila earlier this month denied his request to remain free while he appeals his conviction, this week he asked the US District Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit directly the US if he could stay out of prison while his case progresses on appeal. process; the request automatically puts the reporting date on hold while the court considers his request, the Journal says.
It’s just the latest twist in a Silicon Valley story that captivated the business world at large and even led to a Emmy Award Winner limited series called “The Dropout” on Hulu.
In January 2022, after a nearly four-month trial, Holmes was convicted of four counts of fraud and conspiracy related to Theranos, her failed blood testing company. At her sentencing hearing in November of last year, Judge Dávila ordered her to “turn herself in” on April 27, 2023.
In denying Holmes’ earlier request to remain free while he appeals his conviction, Judge Dávila wrote that while Holmes presented “clear and convincing evidence that she would not flee,” he did not believe that she raised a “substantial issue of law or fact” that could result in “a reversal or order for a new trial of all charges ”.
Former Theranos Chairman and COO Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, who was also convicted last year of defrauding the company’s investors and its patients, also asked the Ninth Circuit if he could remain free while he contested his sentence. His offer was rejected three weeks later, but the move allowed her to push for her own delivery to a low-security prison in San Pedro, California, from mid-March to Thursday, April 20.
It’s unclear if it will have any impact, but on Monday, a criminal defense attorneys association urged the Ninth Circuit to ask for a new test for Holmes, saying prosecutors circumvented procedural rules by revealing the identity of a witness, Kingshuk Das, a former clinical laboratory director at Theranos, just five weeks before the government’s opening arguments at trial. They argue that the move was a violation of Rule 16 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, which is intended to give defendants sufficient time to prepare their defense.
Holmes has two children under the age of two. Prior to this latest development, she was set to turn herself in to the US Marshal’s Office and then be transferred to a federal prison. The court reportedly recommended the federal prison camp in Bryan, Texas, about 100 miles from Houston, where she Holmes partly grew up and where she continues to have family.
According to the Houston ChronicleThe minimum-security facility has dormitory accommodations for its roughly 550 inmates, has a low staff-to-inmate ratio, and is “job and program oriented,” according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
Holmes, who dropped out of Stanford in 2003 to build Theranos, was widely praised by the business press for developing technology that she said could test for hundreds of conditions with just a prick of blood. Investors also believed Holmes’s claims, providing more than $400 million in financing to the company and assigning it a valuation of $9 billion.
That narrative began to unravel in 2015, after a series of WSJ articles revealed that its technology was not working as advertised.
In June 2018, Holmes and Balwani were charged with criminal fraud; shortly thereafter, the company announced to shareholders that it would be formally dissolving.
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