Elizabeth Holmes (Photo by Kimberly White/Getty Images)
US District Judge Edward Davila ordered jurors back to the salt mines this morning in California in the fraud trial of Elizabeth Holmes, founder of the medical testing company Theranos. Because they’ve been there since September 8, when prosecutors made their opening statements, so what’s another few days, right?
Jurors sent a note Monday morning saying that they had failed to reach a unanimous verdict on three of eleven counts — meaning that they have agreed on eight of the charges arising from Holmes’s well-documented scheme to market blood testing machines that never existed.
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During her career, Holmes, who dropped out of Stanford at 19, was able to persuade sophisticated investors like Rupert Murdoch, Larry Ellison, Jim Mattis, and George Schultz, who should definitely have known better, that she had somehow managed to create a machine which could perform dozens of blood tests on a single drop of blood. Touted as the youngest female self-made billionaire in America, she charmed the public and graced the covers of every business magazine.
The whole edifice came crashing down after Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou published a series of articles in 2015 and 2016 examining her outlandish claims, later expanded in a book entitled Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup.
Now 37, Holmes was indicted in June of 2018, but the trial was delayed due to her pregnancy. In court, she attempted to divert blame for misleading investors onto her former romantic and business partner Sunny Balwani, claiming that he was emotionally abusive and controlling.
As Reuters points out, three of the charges involve defrauding individual patients. The remaining counts involve fraud against investors and conspiracy, and, while it’s not clear which charges the jury has deadlocked on, it’s possible that they have reached a partial verdict on the investment-related counts.
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Judge Davila gave the jury an “Allen charge,” sending them back to deliberate further, because, unlike Elizabeth Holmes, his courtroom gets results.
That’s the theory, anyway. We’ll see.
U.S. jury in Theranos trial keeps deliberating after disagreement [Reuters]
Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.