Senator Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey, recently praised Elizabeth Holmes’s thoughtful focus and “determination to make a difference.”The actress Ricki Noel Lander said Ms. Holmes was “a trustworthy friend and a genuinely lovely person.”And Channing Robertson, who was a professor of chemical engineering at Stanford University, commended Ms. Holmes for her “compassion for others.”Their comments were part of a cache of more than 100 letters that were filed over the last week to a federal judge in San Jose, Calif., in an effort to reduce the punishment for Ms. Holmes, the founder of the failed blood testing start-up Theranos. In January, she was convicted of four counts of defrauding investors about Theranos’s technology and business dealings. She is scheduled to be sentenced for those crimes on Friday.Ms. Holmes, 38, faces a maximum of 20 years in prison, according to federal sentencing guidelines for wire fraud. Her lawyers have …
