Elizabeth Holmes will try to force a key prosecution witness to talk about her mental health

Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes wants to force a key prosecution witness – who testified against her last year and then showed up at her home after her fraud conviction this year – to discuss her mental health as part of of his candidacy for a new trial.

Holmes, 38, argued in U.S. District Court in San Jose that an August visit to his residence by former Theranos lab director Dr. Adam Rosendorff provided new evidence that compels Judge Edward Davila to overturn the January jury verdict. The jury found Holmes guilty on four counts of defrauding investors in his now-defunct Palo Alto blood testing startup.

Time is running out for Holmes, who is due to be sentenced on November 18. Legal experts believe she will receive a multi-year prison sentence for her crimes, which cost investors more than $144 million.

Holmes’ legal team expressed Rosendorff as regretting her trial testimony against her; they also suggested in court that federal prosecutors may have been at fault in their interactions with Rosendorff. But the doctor testified at a special hearing last week that he stood by his statements in the witness box during his trial, where he said he felt “obligated in a way moral and ethical view of alerting the public” to inaccurate Theranos test results.

Holmes’ attorney Lance Wade at last week’s hearing raised concerns about Rosendorff’s mental health, based largely on an interview the doctor gave to a Jewish publication. obscure.

Holmes’ legal team presented the court with an article published in September by the South African Jewish Report: In this article, the South African-born doctor says the stress he felt while reporting Theranos led to a “breakdown, medication, hospitalization and health issues.”

Rosendorff is directly quoted as saying, “I was only really able to get off the drugs when the trials were scheduled for early 2020,” in apparent reference to the federal criminal trials of Holmes and his co-defendant, the former Theranos chief operating officer, Sunny Balwani, who was tried and convicted separately for fraud. Rosendorff also testified at Balwani’s trial.

Holmes’ attorneys noted in a filing that Rosendorff’s profile on the professional networking website LinkedIn includes a link to the Jewish Report article.

Rosendorff, at last week’s hearing, said his ‘mental state was sound’ the day he visited Holmes’ residence, but he refused to answer questions from Holmes’ attorney Lance Wade , on the article’s references to his alleged depression, medication and hospitalization, saying “I find this line of questioning intrusive.

Federal prosecutor John Bostic objected to the questions, and Davila upheld the objection. After Wade raised the issue again, Rosendorff said, “I don’t think any health issues influenced the truth of my interactions with the government.”

In a court filing on Monday, Holmes’ lawyers said they would file a motion to force Rosendorff to answer — in a non-public hearing — questions he did not address in court.

“There is little doubt that, depending on the nature of the mental health issue, this could be relevant to the credibility of his testimony at trial, at the evidentiary hearing, and/or his conduct at Theranos,” the filing states.

Prosecutors in a Monday filing attacked Holmes’ claim that Rosendorff’s mental state could have tainted his testimony. They argued that the court record “contains no indication that Dr. Rosendorff suffered from a mental health condition that affected his ability to serve as a reliable witness” and that “newly raised and unsubstantiated insinuations about the Dr. Rosendorff’s mental health do not warrant disregarding his testimony or granting a new trial.

Legal experts have said Holmes’ attempt to use Rosendorff’s sanity in his bid for a new trial is unlikely to succeed. New York defense attorney Jennifer Kennedy Park, who has followed the Holmes case closely, noted that Davila cleared Bostic’s objection to questions about mental health references in the Jewish article. Postponement. “I think the judge has already ruled it’s irrelevant,” Park said.

Former Santa Clara County District Attorney Steven Clark said witnesses in high-profile cases such as Holmes’s can come under significant pressure. “I can see how hard that wear and tear on (Rosendorff) was, but that doesn’t mean he suffered from… delusions or something so he doesn’t have the ability to be a witness,” Clark said. “The government continues to emphasize that Dr. Rosendorff’s testimony was consistent in both trials and corroborated by other evidence.”