Disgraced Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes is out of federal prison while appealing a conviction for fraud she committed while overseeing a blood test scam that exposed the darker side of Silicon Valley. Her attempts to try were rejected.
In an 11-page ruling issued late Monday, U.S. District Judge Edward Davila ruled that Holmes had been released on bail while he tried to persuade an appeals court, alleging misconduct during his four-month trial. concluded that there was not enough convincing evidence to admit that to an unfair judgment.
The judge’s decision means Holmes, 39, will surrender to authorities on April 27, beginning the 11-year-plus prison sentence Davila imposed in November. She was 10 years old after her jury convicted her of four frauds and conspiracies against her Thearanos investors who believed in her promise to revolutionize the healthcare industry. A month later her sentence was handed down.
Holmes accompanied her attorney to a courtroom in San Jose, Calif., on March 17, 2019, saying that various blunders and omissions of material evidence by federal prosecutors would prove her innocence before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. tried to convince Davila that
Her prison term is set to begin nearly 20 years after Holmes dropped out of Stanford University at age 19 to found Theranos in Palo Alto, California. Palo Her Alto is the same city where William Hewlett and David Packard founded their eponymous company in a small company. I built a garage and sowed the seeds of what grew in Silicon Valley.
Holmes may file a separate appeal against Davila’s latest judgment, which has been handed down. This is the modus operandi that her co-conspirator in Theranos, Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, has successfully done to delay the planned March 16 date to begin a prison sentence of almost 13 years. But last week, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed that appeal, and Balwani is scheduled to appear in a Southern California jail on April 20.
Davila recommends that Holmes serve time in a Byron, Texas prison. Whether or not it will be the facility she reports on has yet to be publicly confirmed.
Unless she finds a way to be free, Holmes will be separated from the two children she had, leading up to trial and after her conviction.
Her first child, a boy, was born shortly before the trial began in September 2021. The youngest child, whose gender has not been clarified in court documents, was born sometime after the November sentencing. She got pregnant both with her current partner William “Billy” Evans, whom she met after breaking up with Balwani in the midst of Theranos’ scandalous downfall.
The refusal of Holmes’ demands to remain free is the latest twist in a long-running tale that has been the subject of HBO documentaries and award-winning Hulu TV series.
Holmes and Balwani were tried separately but were accused of essentially the same crimes, centered around a ruse to advertise Theranos’ blood-testing system as a healthcare breakthrough. It raised about $1 billion and at one point became a Silicon Valley sensation by giving Holmes a $4.5 billion fortune.
Holmes also spoke on the same stage as former President Bill Clinton and talked about Theranos in glowing cover stories for business magazines that compared her to tech visionaries such as Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. I made it up.
But Theranos’ technology didn’t work as Holmes and Balwani boasted. The result was the scandalous collapse of the company and a criminal case that shined a bright light on Silicon Valley’s greed and arrogance.