A San Francisco court has upheld the conviction of Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes – who defrauded investors out of hundreds of millions of dollars while operating her failed blood-testing start-up – rejecting her multi-year appeal.
The court also upheld the conviction of Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, her former lover and president of Theranos, which was once valued at $9bn.
A three-judge panel for the 9th US circuit court of appeals rejected claims of legal errors at their separate trials held in 2022.
Holmes (41) was indicted alongside Balwani in 2018. The two were tried separately and sentenced in 2022 to 11 years and three months, and 12 years and 11 months, respectively.
Holmes was ordered to pay $452m in restitution to investors, but a judge placed the penalty on hold due to her limited financial resources. Her sentence has been reduced by more than two years for good behaviour while she has been in prison, and she is expected to be released in 2032, after having served a nine-year sentence.
The Guardian reports that Holmes’ lawyers, who filed the appeal in April 2023, alleged that her trial had featured improper procedures and evidence.
A US attorney disagreed and in an initial hearing on the appeal in 2024, said that “it was not really contested that the device did not work,” referring to Theranos’ error-prone Edison blood-testing machine.
Holmes had claimed that the Edison could perform a wide range of medical tests with a single drop of a patient’s blood, which would have represented a significant advance in biotechnology. Her invention never lived up to her promises.
The Guardian article – US court upholds Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes’s conviction (Open access)
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Theranos: A cautionary tale on how not to commercialise medical advances