Holmes’ team takes final swipe at charges

A lawyer for former Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes on Friday likened her final days running the troubled blood-testing startup to a captain valiantly trying to save a sinking ship.

Had Holmes committed any crimes, she would have been scurrying to jump overboard like a scared rat, her lawyer, Kevin Downey, told jurors as he wrapped up roughly five hours of closing arguments. Federal prosecutors spent three hours Thursday explaining why the jury should convict her.

Referring to a 2016 turning point that threatened to ruin Theranos, Downey asked the jury: “Did she leave? No, she stayed. Why? Because she believed in this technology.“

After federal prosecutor John Bostic completes a rebuttal argument, the case will head to the jury after more than 14 weeks of extensive testimony and an array of other evidence that includes more than 900 exhibits.

Bostic returned to many of the themes touched upon in Thursday’s arguments when fellow prosecutor Jeffrey Schenk cast her as a charlatan who brazenly lied to become rich and famous. Those purported goals were achieved in 2014 when Holmes became a media sensation with an estimated fortune of $4.5 billion based on her 50 percent stake in Theranos.

Holmes, now 37, is facing 11 felony counts of fraud and conspiracy alleging she duped investors, business partners and patients about Theranos’ technology. She repeatedly claimed that the company’s new testing device could scan for hundreds of diseases and other problems with a few drops of blood taken with a finger prick instead of a needle stuck in a vein.

Unknown to most people outside Theranos, the company’s blood-testing technology was flawed, often producing inaccurate results that could have endangered the lives of patients who took the tests.

After the flaws were exposed in 2015 and 2016, Theranos eventually collapsed. The Justice Department filed its criminal case in 2018.