Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes requests court toss her conviction

Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes asked the court to toss her fraud conviction on Thursday in a last-ditch effort to avoid jail time, Bloomberg reported.

Holmes’s lawyer, Amy Saharia, claimed that the 38-year-old did not misrepresent her blood-testing startup Theranos to investors and did not know she was misrepresenting the company, according to Bloomberg.

Saharia also contended that prosecutors did not meet the standard for proving Holmes had criminal intent to commit fraud. Bloomberg noted that asking the court to toss a conviction is a common and often unsuccessful play by those convicted of white-collar crimes.

A federal jury found Holmes guilty of four counts of wire fraud in January. Holmes attracted numerous wealthy individuals to invest in her now defunct company, which claimed to be able to run multiple diagnostic tests with a single drop of blood.

Theranos COO Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, Holmes’s second-in-command, was convicted of 12 counts of wire fraud in July for defrauding investors and patients, according to the Washington Post.