SAN FRANCISCO — A judge on Monday denied Elizabeth Holmes’s requests for a new trial, paving the way for the entrepreneur to be sentenced next week for defrauding investors and potentially sent to prison later this month.
Ms. Holmes, who was convicted in January on four counts of wire fraud and conspiracy while running her blood testing start-up, Theranos, has spent the intervening months trying to change her fate. She had filed three requests for a new trial based on newly acquired evidence.
But in an order on Monday, Judge Edward J. Davila of U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California rejected the requests and said they did not meet the bar for a new trial.
Ms. Holmes, 38, is scheduled to be sentenced on Nov. 18. Each fraud count carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison, which would most likely be served concurrently.
In court last month, Ms. Holmes appeared to be pregnant with a second child. She has been out on bail, living in Woodside, Calif., with her partner and young son. She is expected to file an appeal after the sentencing.
A lawyer for Ms. Holmes did not respond to a request for comment.
Ms. Holmes had requested a new trial based on new evidence including an unusual visit to her home in August by Dr. Adam Rosendorff, a key witness for the prosecution.
After Ms. Holmes claimed that Dr. Rosendorff had made statements that called his testimony into question, Judge Davila ordered him to appear in court to affirm his testimony.
On the stand last month, Dr. Rosendorff, who was Theranos’s lab director and helped expose the company’s fraud, explained that he had visited Ms. Holmes to help find closure and put the saga behind him.
Mr. Holmes’s lawyers questioned Dr. Rosendorff’s mental health and state of mind while testifying in the trial. They used a comment he made at Ms. Holmes’s house to accuse the government of painting a skewed picture of what happened at Theranos.
Dr. Rosendorff testified that his statements on the stand — which lasted six days during Ms. Holmes’s four-month trial last year — were all accurate. He specified that one comment he made — that “everyone was working so hard to do something good and meaningful” at Theranos — expressly did not include Ms. Holmes or Ramesh Balwani, her co-conspirator.
In a 15-page order on Monday, Judge Davila said he had found Dr. Rosendorff’s statements under oath to be credible. He said Ms. Holmes’s other requests for a new trial, which involved arguments from the subsequent trial of Mr. Balwani as well as a missing database of test results, also did not merit a new trial.
Judge Davila wrote in places that Ms. Holmes’s arguments were “not material,” “would strain credulity” and were “not likely to result in acquittal if they were included in a new trial.”
Mr. Balwani, 57, was convicted of 12 counts of fraud and conspiracy this summer and is set to be sentenced on Dec. 7.
