Patients Will Testify In Elizabeth Holmes’ Trial

A judge has denied a motion by Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes’s legal team to suppress evidence of erroneous test results in her trial for wire fraud, scheduled for the fall. The prosecution will put patients on the stand to bolster their case that Holmes knew her company’s technology produced inaccurate results but promoted it nonetheless. Her attorneys argued that patient testimony is anecdotal, and would violate her rights to due process. They claimed a database that housed millions of test results plus quality control data would have shown that the technology produced accurate results, but it was lost when the company crashed after Holmes’ indictment in 2018. Prosecutors have a copy, but were unable to view the contents because they weren’t given the encryption key. Theranos dismantled the original database shortly after sending the copy to prosecutors. The judge was unsympathetic to defense arguments that prosecutors failed to preserve access to the database, which they claimed could have shown accurate test results. He said it was just as likely to contain incriminating evidence, so any exculpatory value is speculative,