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Don't know all of the details behind each count, but glad to see this result, which seems good and fair. Basically, looks like the majority of "committing fraud against investors" charges were guilty, but the "committing fraud against patients", which always seemed like more of a stretch to me, were not guilty.

I wonder if that was because they used other testing methods to check patient samples, so they patient got a result regardless of the means by which it was obtained.

NAL, but I believe the prosecution would need to prove damages.

If, like you said, the patients still got their results, the results were correct, and it was only how those results were obtained that lead to the patient fraud charges, then I think you maybe correct.

Again, I'm not a lawyer, so people should feel free to correct me if what I said was wrong.

Still seems like fraud to me, they advertised a single drop of blood and they ended up taking blood samples the normal method.

And exactly what damage was done, slightly less blood in the patient?

I think in some case un-necessary and costly procedures were performed as some of the test were inaccurate.

Patients were affected by inaccurate results: https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/21/22687026/theranos-patient...

Can you expand? Investors are risk-heavy VCs who expect more than 50% of investments to fail

Patients just saw a blood testing service promising the same accuracy as a blood draw and went for it

I might be wrong but my understanding is that the patients' blood was tested on legit equipment so they did get valid results. It just wasn't using the Theranos technology. So investors (and Wallgreens) were defrauded because they were mislead but the patient experience was valid (since the results were correct and from proper equipment).

> I might be wrong

I think you are: https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/21/22687026/theranos-patient...

Or Not.

https://www.businessinsider.com/theranos-problems-blood-test...

Not exactly sure what you are referring to, but this seems consistent with my article.

> To use traditional machines, Theranos had to dilute some of the smaller samples it collected. It appears that Theranos carried out another 60 tests using this method in December 2014.

> Some of the potassium results at Theranos were so high that patients would have to be dead for the results to be correct, according to one former employee. This is because, lab experts told The Journal, "finger-pricked blood samples can be less pure than those drawn from a vein because finger-pricked blood often mixes with fluids from tissue and cells that can interfere with tests."

I am not a lawyer, this is just my rationale:

Holmes clearly lied to investors, and even if she may have "believed" in the long term prospects of her company, she also clearly intentionally lied to investors to get their money. The investors were also obviously harmed (they lost their money). Also, the fact that VCs expect a lot of their companies to fail is totally irrelevant. VCs (and more importantly, the law) also expect founders to tell the truth on simple statements of fact, e.g. "We recieved this much revenue" or "This machine can perform X, Y, Z tests now". Again, Holmes didn't just exaggerate or say "This machine can perform X, Y, Z tests in the future". She flat out lied about the current capabilities of her company.

With patients, most of the tests were done on standard equipment. I don't believe patients were ever told "we will test your blood on Edison", and more importantly, they probably wouldn't have cared that much - they just wanted their test results. So with the tests done on standard equipment, hard to argue there was much harm done there.

Now, some tests were done on Edison, and I know Walgreens invalidated a whole bunch of Theranos tests. But even then, it's harder to say Holmes intended to deceive in that case (a prerequisite for the fraud charge) - presumably they chose to run them on Edison and not the other equipment because they thought Edison could handle those tests. The fact that the lab was sloppy, the fact that Edison had issues, that in my mind wouldn't be enough to assert wire fraud on the part of Holmes. All in all it's just kind of hard to say that patients were really defrauded at all. If Theranos had instead just completely made up some of their test results, and Holmes directed that behavior, then yes, that would have been fraud against patients, but that's not what happened.

I feel the exact opposite. The investors that actually did their due diligence ran away from Theranos. I feel no sympathy for the investors that bought into it. I do however feel tremendous sympathy for the patients that received erroneous test results.

Sympathy has nothing to do with it. The fact that the defrauded investors didn't do more due diligence also has nothing to do with it. The question when it comes to fraud is whether Holmes intentionally deceived the defrauded party, and was that defrauded party harmed (again, I'm not a lawyer, just my understanding). With the investors that was clearly an unambiguous yes. With patients it's much more of a gray area on both the "intentionally" point and the "were they actually harmed" point.

Apparently the "No verdict" might get declared a mistrial on 3 counts.

For those unaware John Carreyrou played a major role in exposing Holmes. His book is a good read: Bad Blood and host of Bad Blood: The Final Chapter

https://twitter.com/JohnCarreyrou/status/1478158063379042304

> And the judge will probably declare a mistrial as to the 3 counts they couldn’t reach consensus on.

> The 4 guilty counts are all investor counts. The investor conspiracy count and the counts relating to the hedge fund PFM, the ex Cravath attorney Mosley and the DeVos family.

EDIT: Mistrial only on those 3 counts which got no verdict, not the full trial. Also this is only if the Feds want to do it or now which will also depend upon how many years Holmes gets as well as if she just decides to plead guilty on those 3 charges.

Why would a mistrial be declared? Does that prevent a future prosecution of these charges?

It will likely result in a new trial of those counts.

It will depend on if the prosecutor thinks it's worth it. Often it won't be if they already got a guilty on enough counts to add up.

If the prosecution decides to pursue it. They may very well decide that finding her guilty on 4 of 11 counts sends a strong enough message.

It's not about sending a message, it's that the sentence will almost certainly be carried out concurrently. That means even if she is found guilty of the remaining counts it won't result in any additional time served.

Boy, it's all about the wire-fraud, isn't it? The MONEY itself seems to have filed this lawsuit.

It's fraud case, so it exists entirely because someone was separated from their money illegally. I imagine in part this case was brought to protect some of that money through insurance, which may pay out if the fraud is proven.

I think it's about wire fraud because the prosecution was able to prove she had motive to commit fraud. Whereas with the patients, it seems, the jury believed she did not intend to cause fraud upon the patients.

These are big wins! Some huge sums up there. How many years is she looking at?

20 years per count

That's the maximum possible the judge could decide to give. It bears little relationship to what the federal sentencing guidelines will actually suggest or the judge will deliver.

https://www.popehat.com/2013/02/05/crime-whale-sushi-sentenc...

Technically 20 years per count, but realistically not too many. White collar crimes are anyways not punished very strictly, and she's a new mother on top of that. She'll negotiate a short term at some country club prison.

There are really no "country club prisons" in the US anymore.

Yes, there are minimum security prison camps for first time, non violent offenders, which seems entirely appropriate, but a day spa it aint.

“What it’s really like inside ‘Club Fed’ prisons”:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/reliable-source/wp/2015/...

I'm not an expert in US sentencing guidelines, but a quick crack at the sentencing guidelines calculator [1] suggests ~97-121 months, or about 8-10 years.

[If you're not familiar with sentencing, the basic procedure is this:

1. Compute an 'offense level' for each count. For counts that are strongly related (which all of these likely are), combine by taking the maximum offense level. If they're not related, it's more complicated (not simply adding them up).

2. Compute a 'criminal history level'. For Holmes, that's basically "no criminal history."

3. Adjust for things like the convicted person's remorse or cooperation with investigators.

4. Look up a table that maps offense and criminal history to an actual sentencing range.

5. Adjust that (primarily, but not exclusively, in the previously output range) based on the judge's feelings.]

[1] https://www.sentencing.us/

Did Theranos blood test work?

No. The very fact this trial occurred is testament to that fact.

That’s not how the presumption of innocence works.

She wasn't being tried on the technology. The technology had failed, the issue is she knew it didn't work and told people it did to get their money. If the technology worked then even if the business failed with huge losses, there was no fraud.

The presumption of innocence in this case, is that she did not mislead Investors.

My understanding is that it worked in the sense that the results were accurate. But the results were gotten by means other than what the investors/customers thought. So the end-user patients really had no claim since they got correct results. But the companies and investors got scammed bigtime.

I haven't been following the trial closely, but I spent a bit of time skimming through some of the case documents a while back. The government's allegations included a bunch of supporting statements from doctors, who claimed that Theranos frequently gave their patients wildly inaccurate results. It sounds like they weren't able to convince the jury of Holmes' guilt on those charges.

(IIRC, Holmes' lawyers also made the argument that it was not legally possible for her to have committed wire fraud against the patients, because any money that Theranos received would have come from their insurance companies.)

Part of the difficulty is that the empirical data that would have proven how well (or poorly) the technology worked was allegedly stored in a proprietary, bespoke database. When Theranos was ordered to turn over the data to the feds for discovery, they delivered an encrypted copy, and then claimed that the encryption key was lost and the original disk arrays were unrecoverable. Both sides of the case then blamed each other for destroying the last remaining copy of the data, which made for some fun reading.

They appear to have used commercial equipment for some of their tests, but they appear to have diluted sample until the results were no longer valid.

Here's one report on an invalid pregnancy test:

https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/21/22687026/theranos-patient...

This is wrong. I read Bad Blood by John Carreyrou a few years ago and it mentions there were a lot of false results due to mishandling the blood samples (watering them down to run enough tests etc). I recommend the book if you're interested in the case.

> there were a lot of false results due to mishandling the blood samples

This doesn't hold with what was found in the trial. She was found not guilty on those counts. Just because a dude wrote it down in a book doesn't mean it's true. And the legal process found it to be, in fact, not true.

That's not what a "not guilty" verdict means.

The jury didn't find that the results given to the patients were accurate. They found that Holmes was not personally, criminally culpable for wire fraud in those cases. Wire fraud is a crime that has very specific elements, well beyond the question of how accurate the test results were.

That dude was the journalist who brought Theranos down, and if this was false Theranos wouldn’t have failed overnight like it did.

The vast majority of results were not only not accurate, couldn't possibly have been accurate given the methods they were using to conduct the tests. This is well documented. I suggest John Carreyrou's book, _Bad Blood_, which gets into great detail on this.

Once again, just because some dude wrote it down in a book doesn't mean it's a fact. The jury just acquitted her of those charges. Maybe they didn't the read dude's book?

The jury made no judgements as to the efficacy of the tests. In fact, both the prosecution and the defense stipulated that the Theranos project was a failure. The defense even stated that "Failure is not fraud." The question before the jury was whether or not she had defrauded investors.

They decided that she had.

FWIW, every single firm that had medical expertise declined to invest in Theranos. They could see it had extremely minimal chance of success.

Short answer: "no."

Longer answer: Theranos never really got their own custom machines working. Until those machines were working, they did use other machines and processes which did work. However, their entire shtick was trying to do a lot of tests on less blood than usual, so... they simply diluted the blood samples to get enough volume for those machines to function in the first place, and correspondingly, the results were absolute garbage. Effectively, they were using working machines incorrectly to cover up for their non-working machines.

I think it goes further than that, the point is that scientifically the tests could never have worked.

Carreyrou originally got tipped off by pathologists saying that this was impossible, then they got sued into oblivion (see thepathologyblawg).

(IANAP but this is my understanding)

Some real tests rely on having a huge blood sample (e.g. 100ml), being filtered (e.g. by centrifuge) and then a test of a known sensitivity applied.

Theranos claimed that their tests were more sensitive so could work with smaller samples. Statistically this doesn't work because with a finger-prick test (e.g. 1ml) the sample is 100x less likely to contain the target cells - cells are integers.

Additionally finger-prick tests contain only capillary blood - they're filtered by the finger blood vessels only allowing tiny cells - some of the Theranos tests claimed they could detect markers that only exist in arterial and venous blood.

My understanding is that the tests that Theranos actually ran on patients' blood was actually based on drawing blood from the veins, not the finger-prick test. While Theranos did want to do the finger-prick tests--and it wouldn't have worked for the reasons you mentioned--that they didn't get them working meant they couldn't get certification for actually running those tests. So they ran the tests they did get certification for (which was using venous blood draws), for the most part, but even then, they were running tests in ways that violated the procedures they were supposed to be using.

(I do realize that keeping track of how precisely Theranos was lying can be frustrating, since they were doing multiple levels of lying here.)

There's a podcast called bad blood that goes into detail how little it worked.

What an odd sums of money ending with 9s. Does anyone know why such numbers were picked?

What are you talking about?

Count six of wire fraud in connection with a wire transfer of $38,336,632 on or about Feb. 6, 2014: Guilty.

    Count seven of wire fraud in connection with a wire transfer of $99,999,984 on or about Oct. 31, 2014:Guilty.

    Count eight of wire fraud in connection with a wire transfer of $5,999,997 on or about Oct. 31, 2014: Guilty.

The $38m one likely has to do with share count or funds.

Often shares will be split %-wise between two or more funds. I.e. 22.5% goes to XYZ Fund 1, 85.5% goes to XYZ Fund 2. These % can be super specific and make it so wires go down to the cent.

Round number minus various transfer fees maybe?

It's probably minus the wire fee, so you can round up.

Because someone says "I'll invest $100,000,000" and it's not evenly divisible by the share price.

Interesting you can tell how much the wire transfer fee was in each case. How does it compare to the major crypto exchanges?