Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes will be jailed by the end of the month after a judge refused her request to remain out of prison while she appeals her conviction.
Holmes must self-report to a prison camp on 27 April to begin the 11.25-year sentence she was handed after a jury convicted her on multiple counts of defrauding investors in her blood-testing start-up.
The former Silicon Valley darling was found guilty last November on three charges of wire fraud and one conspiracy charge.
A jury was told how she had duped investors with false claims that her California company’s technology could diagnose diseases with only a few drops of blood.
Her lawyers had asked US District Judge Edward Davila to allow Holmes to remain on house arrest while she appeals the conviction to the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals.
They argued that she was not a threat to her community or a flight risk as she has two young children, reported Reuters.
But prosecutors told the judge that she was a flight risk given her means to leave the US and her long prison sentence.
The federal government has previously claimed that Holmes booked a one-way flight to Mexico following her conviction and that she does present a flight risk. Her attorneys argued that she and her partner Billy Evans were planning to attend a wedding and hoped she would be acquitted.
“Booking international travel plans for a criminal defendant in anticipation of a complete defence victory is a bold move, and the failure to promptly cancel those plans after a guilty verdict is a perilously careless oversight,” the judge wrote.
The judge ruled that even if her appeal was successful it would not result in a new trial or reverse all of the convictions against her.
He has previously turned down multiple requests from Holmes for a new trial.
Holmes started Theranos after dropping out of Stanford University, but the company collapsed in 2018 after it was revealed that its technology did not work.
