Jury finds Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes guilty on four counts

Source: The Hill | January 3, 2022 | Joseph Choi

A federal jury on Monday found Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes guilty on four counts of wire fraud, more than two years after she was charged with misleading investors with fraudulent claims about the efficacy of her blood-testing technology.

The jury made up of eight men and four women found Holmes, 37, guilty after a four-month trial on three counts of wire fraud against Theranos investors and one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, as The Wall Street Journal reported.

The jury found Holmes not guilty on three counts of committing wire fraud against patients who had paid Theranos for blood test results. The jury was unable to reach a verdict on two other counts of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud.

CNBC reported that U.S. District Court Judge Edward Davila will sentence Holmes at a later date. Holmes potentially faces decades in prison, with the penalty for wire fraud being up to 20 years.

Her conviction is a bleak result for the Stanford University dropout, who was once hailed as the next Steve Jobs, after whom she modeled herself.

With her lofty claim of being able to conduct a multitude of diagnostic tests with only one drop of blood, Holmes was able to attract a bevy of eager investors, including the family of former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, media mogul Rupert Murdoch and the pharmacy chain Walgreens.

Apart from investors, Holmes also had a slew of cultural and political luminaries who publicly supported her ambitions. Former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and George Schultz sat on Theranos’s board of directors.

Holmes once participated in a panel with former President Clinton, who said he was “impressed” by her “dogged determination” to improve the quality of laboratory tests.

During the trial, prosecutors said that Holmes “chose fraud over business failure,” having recognized that her company’s flagship product had numerous defects, but still decided against informing her many investors.

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