Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes’ sentence reduced by almost two years

Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes is now scheduled to get out of prison nearly two years earlier than her original sentence mandated, according to an update from the U.S. Bureau of Prisons.

Holmes, 39, surrendered herself for imprisonment May 30, to start serving a sentence of 11 years and three months. But her updated release date is December 29, 2032, just over the 9½ years that federal prison rules say she must remain locked up at a minimum.

The prisons bureau confirmed Holmes’ new release date, but said privacy, safety and security reasons prevent it from discussing inmates’ release plans.

Generally, those incarcerated in federal prisons can earn 54 days of “Good Conduct Time” off their sentences for each year of their sentence, according to the prisons bureau. Eligible inmates can also earn time off from their sentences by participating and completing programs for reducing post-prison re-offending, and educational, health, recovery, victim-impact and employment-training programs. Inmates can also get out up to a year early by completing a drug-abuse program.

Lawyers for Holmes did not immediately respond to questions about her new release date.

Holmes, 39, was sentenced in November in U.S. District Court in San Jose to 11 years and three months in prison for defrauding investors in her now-defunct Palo Alto blood-testing startup out of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Holmes gained worldwide fame as she propelled her startup to success through claims that its purportedly revolutionary technology could conduct a full range of blood tests using just a few drops of blood from a finger stick. Jurors in her four-month trial heard that Theranos’ machines could perform only a handful of tests, suffered from reliability problems, and that Holmes bamboozled investors with false claims and insinuations about use of the technology by the U.S. military, endorsement by major pharmaceutical firms, and the state of the firm’s finances.

The charismatic former technology company founder and mother of two young children fought in court with some success to delay her imprisonment past the April 27 date handed her by Judge Edward Davila, but ultimately had to turn herself over to prison authorities May 30 at federal Prison Camp Bryan near Houston.

She is appealing her January 2022 conviction by a jury on four counts of fraud, claiming Davila made errors conducting the trial, that her conviction was “unjust,” and that her sentence was too severe. Criminal-case appeals rarely succeed, according to a U.S. federal courts fact sheet.