Federal appeals court rejects Elizabeth Holmes’ last-ditch effort to overturn fraud conviction, 11-year prison sentence

Elizabeth Holmes has blonde hair and is wearing a dark blue suit over a black shirt. She is standing behind a podium and partitions inside a wood-paneled courtroom and appears to be speaking to someone off-camera.

Former Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes arrives at federal court in San Jose, Calif., Monday, Oct. 17, 2022 (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu).

A federal appeals court in California on Monday upheld the criminal convictions, sentence, and restitution ordered against Elizabeth Holmes, who was found guilty of perpetrating a massive fraud through her multibillion-dollar tech startup, Theranos.

A three-judge panel on the San Francisco-based U. S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit unanimously upheld Holmes’ conviction on four federal crimes, her 11-year prison sentence, and more than $200 million restitution payment. The court similarly affirmed the nearly 13-year sentence for Holmes’ ex-boyfriend and former Theranos COO Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani along with nearly $250 million in restitution owed to the investors the duo defrauded.

The now-41-year-old Holmes in 2015 was ranked by Forbes as the youngest and wealthiest self-made billionaire from Theranos. Her company claimed to have developed a revolutionary method to perform blood testing with an amount as small as a finger prick, and at its height, Theranos rose to a $9 billion valuation and counted the likes of News Corp chairman Rupert Murdoch, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and Oracle founder Larry Ellison as investors.

Theranos and Holmes’ larger-than-life reputation came crashing down after the Wall Street Journal’s John Carreyrou investigated her enterprise in a series of articles, followed by a book titled “Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup.” HBO later turned the book into a documentary.

A federal jury in the Northern District of California then agreed that Holmes’ company left behind a trail of fraud.

The judicial panel — made up of Circuit Judges Mary M. Schroeder, Jacqueline H. Nguyen, and Ryan D. Nelson — rejected claims that Holmes’ and Balwani’s separate trials in 2022 were marred by evidentiary errors that should result in their convictions being overturned. The duo argued that the trial court abused its discretion by allowing a former Theranos employee to offer expert opinions despite the fact that he was testifying as a layperson.

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