Twenty Years
If convicted, Martoma, who has pleaded not guilty, faces as long as 20 years in prison on each of two securities-fraud counts and five years for a single conspiracy charge.
Prosecutors in Martoma’s case plan to call two physicians who allegedly gave him inside information about drug tests and their dissapointing results. The doctors, former University of Michigan neurologist Sid Gilman, and Joel Ross, a New Jersey geriatrician and clinical associate professor of medicine at Mt. Sinai School of Medicine, have both been given non-prosecution agreements in exchange for their testimony.
Martoma made a $9.3 million bonus from trades on the doctors’ information, the government claims.
“They’re really going to have to attack the doctors’ credibility,” said Anthony Sabino, a law professor at St. John’s University in New York.
Martoma’s lawyers will have to be careful not to push Gilman and Ross too hard for fear of losing credibility with the jury, Sabino said.
“People are less likely to find fault with a doctor than with a Wall Street guy,” he said.
The trial is expected to take three weeks, lawyers told U.S. District Judge Paul Gardephe, who is overseeing the case. Gardephe, a former prosecutor and civil litigator, was appointed to the bench in 2008 by President George W. Bush, a Republican.
While Martoma’s team has been quiet about trial strategy, pretrial motions filed in the case provide a glimpse of his planned defenses.
His lawyers asked Gardephe to allow the introduction of parts of Cohen’s testimony from a day-long deposition taken in 2012 by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.