SAN FRANCISCO — A choose on Monday denied Elizabeth Holmes’s requests for a brand new trial, paving the best way for the entrepreneur to be sentenced subsequent week for defrauding traders and doubtlessly despatched to jail later this month.
Ms. Holmes, who was convicted in January on 4 counts of wire fraud and conspiracy whereas working her blood testing start-up, Theranos, has spent the intervening months making an attempt to alter her destiny. She had filed three requests for a brand new trial primarily based on newly acquired proof.
However in an order on Monday, Choose Edward J. Davila of U.S. District Court docket for the Northern District of California rejected the requests and mentioned they didn’t meet the bar for a brand new trial.
Ms. Holmes, 38, is scheduled to be sentenced on Nov. 18. Every fraud depend carries a most sentence of 20 years in jail, which might most definitely be served concurrently.
In courtroom final month, Ms. Holmes gave the impression to be pregnant with a second youngster. She has been out on bail, dwelling in Woodside, Calif., along with her companion and younger son. She is predicted to file an attraction after the sentencing.
A lawyer for Ms. Holmes didn’t reply to a request for remark.
Ms. Holmes had requested a brand new trial primarily based on new proof together with an uncommon go to to her dwelling in August by Dr. Adam Rosendorff, a key witness for the prosecution.
After Ms. Holmes claimed that Dr. Rosendorff had made statements that referred to as his testimony into query, Choose Davila ordered him to look in courtroom to affirm his testimony.
On the stand final month, Dr. Rosendorff, who was Theranos’s lab director and helped expose the corporate’s fraud, defined that he had visited Ms. Holmes to assist discover closure and put the saga behind him.
Mr. Holmes’s attorneys questioned Dr. Rosendorff’s psychological well being and frame of mind whereas testifying within the trial. They used a remark he made at Ms. Holmes’s home to accuse the federal government of portray a skewed image of what occurred at Theranos.
Dr. Rosendorff testified that his statements on the stand — which lasted six days throughout Ms. Holmes’s four-month trial final 12 months — have been all correct. He specified that one remark he made — that “everybody was working so onerous to do one thing good and significant” at Theranos — expressly didn’t embody Ms. Holmes or Ramesh Balwani, her co-conspirator.
In a 15-page order on Monday, Choose Davila mentioned he had discovered Dr. Rosendorff’s statements underneath oath to be credible. He mentioned Ms. Holmes’s different requests for a brand new trial, which concerned arguments from the following trial of Mr. Balwani in addition to a lacking database of check outcomes, additionally didn’t benefit a brand new trial.
Choose Davila wrote in locations that Ms. Holmes’s arguments have been “not materials,” “would pressure credulity” and have been “not more likely to end in acquittal in the event that they have been included in a brand new trial.”
Mr. Balwani, 57, was convicted of 12 counts of fraud and conspiracy this summer time and is ready to be sentenced on Dec. 7.
