In a court docket motion to keep independent trials, Balwani’s lawyer, Jeffrey Coopersmith, claimed Holmes’ allegations are “deeply offensive to Mr. Balwani, devastating individually to him, and hugely and unfairly prejudicial to his defense of this scenario.”
The documents ended up between a slew of filings manufactured community by the courtroom in reaction to a request by Dow Jones & Co., which publishes the Wall Avenue Journal, to unseal the pleadings and listening to transcripts affiliated with the government’s evaluation, as perfectly as Balwani’s and her motions to sever their trials.
Just after substantially of the now-defunct company’s alleged misdeeds ended up shrouded in secrecy, hundreds of documents in Holmes’ 3-year-old prison scenario were being submitted less than seal with no information and facts about who filed the documents, what they contained, or why they needed to be retained private.
Attorneys for Dow Jones approximated that 40% of the docket was underneath seal as they argued that the general public — and the press — have a ideal to accessibility the information underneath the 1st Amendment.
Throughout a listening to pertaining to Dow Jones’ movement previously this thirty day period, federal prosecutors explained they ended up originally opposed to sealing the files and wanted clarity on what they could discuss publicly in entrance of the jury all through Holmes’ trial, the Journal claimed.
John Cline, one of Holmes’ lawyers, reported at the time that some documents could be designed public, but in a submitting very last 7 days, her defense workforce argued that they ought to not be unsealed right up until just after the jury is chosen.
“Immediate unsealing would expose probable jurors to a spate of media reviews about the newly disclosed materials,” her lawyers wrote. “That media publicity would lengthen and complicate jury collection and possibility seating jurors motivated by the reviews.”
The concern that possible jurors could be negatively motivated by news reports about Holmes — whose increase and drop was broadly included in the news, a bestselling reserve, documentaries, and a podcast — has been a critical difficulty for the defense during the proceedings. In May possibly, her attorneys proposed a jury questionnaire with extra than 100 issues, like specific queries about possible jurors’ social media use, arguing that an expanded sort was essential to detect any likely biases in opposition to Holmes, Theranos, and Balwani.
“Ms. Holmes is routinely referred to in derisive and inflammatory phrases that are straight applicable to the wire fraud expenses in this case,” her lawyers wrote in their ask for for an expanded questionnaire, citing the use of phrases like “fraud,” “con artist,” and “raging psychopath,” as properly as “recurring themes, often relating to Ms. Holmes’ demeanor, voice, and actual physical physical appearance,” in protection that dates back many years.
“The cumulative influence of this torrent of prejudicial coverage is unmistakable,” they wrote.
Prosecutors had questioned the courtroom to compel Holmes to submit to another psychological analysis executed by govt gurus right after she informed them that she prepared to introduce evidence from Mechanic. The aspects of that evaluation had not nevertheless been manufactured public as of Saturday morning.
