Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes appeals ‘unjust’ conviction

Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes has filed an appeal of her “unjust conviction” on four counts of wire fraud in connection with her now-defunct blood-testing company. 

Holmes in a Monday filing appealed her 2022 conviction, for which she was sentenced last year to more than 11 years in prison.

“This Court should reverse the conviction or at a minimum remand for resentencing,” the filing argues. 

Holmes’s legal team contends that a number of errors plagued Holmes’s trial, and argues that the government “largely parroted the public narrative” that Holmes “knowingly and intentionally misrepresented to investors the capabilities of Theranos’ technology.” 

The filing counters that “highly credentialed Theranos scientists” and outsiders told Holmes that the blood-testing tech worked, that some of the company’s developments received patents and that the Food and Drug Administration approved an assay on proprietary Theranos technology in 2015.

Holmes’s team also argues the government didn’t call its retained expert at trial, and then “toppled the Rules of Evidence and cast aside the Confrontation Clause,” which guarantees defendants in criminal cases the right to confront witnesses, with the “indulgence” of the district court by presenting “quintessential expert opinion” in non-expert testimony.

“These errors—together with the exclusion of prior testimony from Holmes’ co-defendant taking sole responsibility for the company’s financial model—produced an unjust conviction,” the appeal reads.

U.S. District Judge Edward Davila ruled earlier this month that Holmes has to stay jailed during the appeal. He said that the ex-CEO did not introduce new evidence that is “likely to result in reversal or an order for a new trial on all counts.” The court has scheduled Holmes to surrender herself to begin her sentence on April 27.

Holmes and her co-conspirator at Theranos — Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani — faced separate trials, but were both accused of crimes related to misrepresenting Theranos’s blood-testing system to investors and patients. Balwani was convicted on 12 felony counts of defrauding investors and patients, and was sentenced to almost 13 years in prison. 

Holmes famously claimed that the tech only needed as little as a drop of blood to test for a wide range of health conditions.