Lawyers for the disgraced Elizabeth Holmes, founder of failed blood-testing company Theranos, asked a US federal appeals court this week to overturn the fraud conviction that earned her more than 11 years behind bars.
The legal team acting for both Holmes and company president Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani argued that improper procedures and evidence in both cases warranted new trials.
Holmes was indicted with Balwani, her former romantic partner, in 2018. The two were tried separately in 2022 and sentenced to 11 years and three months, and 12 years and 11 months, respectively.
The Guardian reports that her legal team had filed an appeal of her conviction in April 2023, but Tuesday marked the first court hearing on the matter.
Holmes’s lawyer, Amy Saharia, told a three-judge panel that her client had believed she was telling the truth when she told investors the company’s miniature blood testing device could accurately run a broad array of medical diagnostic tests on a small amount of blood.
Saharia’s argument also focused on issues with two main witnesses for the prosecution: former Theranos employee Kingshuk Das, who testified as a scientific expert about Theranos’s product, and former laboratory director Adam Rosendorff.
Holmes’s team argued Das should have faced cross-examination about his qualifications and the judge should have allowed Holmes to introduce more evidence attacking Rosendorff, including details of a government investigation of his work after leaving Theranos.
Those mistakes could have made the difference in the “close” case, in which jurors were not able to reach a verdict on most counts against Holmes after seven days of deliberations, they said.
Assistant US attorney Kelly Volkar, arguing for the government, disputed that Das had improperly testified as an expert, saying he was called to talk about his personal experience at Theranos. She also said “it was not really contested that the device did not work”.
Two judges said that much of Das’s testimony concerned what he observed at the company, not his scientific opinions, as Saharia argued, although they also voiced concerns about what opinions Das was allowed to give during the trial.
Balwani’s lawyer, Jeffrey Coopersmith, argued that prosecutors had gone beyond what was in the indictment against his client by introducing evidence that the commercial testing technology Theranos secretly used was not reliable.
See more from MedicalBrief archives:
Theranos founder Holmes has more jail time cut
Two years sliced off Theranos fraudster’s prison term
Prison for Theranos founder, who must pay back millions