The San Jose, California, trial has spanned three months. After the jurors sent a note to U.S. District Judge Edward Davila to tell him they were deadlocked, Davila told them to take “as much time as necessary” and to continue deliberating.
The jurors were given Thursday off as well as a scheduled Friday holiday break, extending the pause in their deliberations. The reason why they were given Thursday off is not known.
Holmes is currently facing 11 criminal charges—nine counts of wire fraud and two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, according to The New York Times. Each count could carry a prison sentence of up to 20 years.
Holmes, now 37, first established Theranos in 2003 shortly before dropping out of Stanford. The company claimed to have blood-testing technology capable of performing over 1,000 tests with just a few drops of blood, amassing over $900 million from investors.
However, 2015 and 2016 reports by The Wall Street Journal found it could only perform about a dozen tests, and they were riddled with errors.
So far, the jury has spent about 40 hours over six days sifting through the evidence and discussing the charges.
Holmes was present at Monday’s hearing to review the jury’s note. She looked across the courtroom at the jurors when they walked in and walked out, but none appeared to return her glance. Once the jurors were gone, Holmes turned around and hugged her mother, who was sitting behind her. Her father then kissed her forehead through his mask, which court rules require of everyone present.
The eight men and four women who will determine Holmes’ fate spent much of their holiday season behind closed doors in a San Jose, California, courthouse, weighing reams of evidence presented during a three-month trial that captivated Silicon Valley.
They hadn’t provided any inkling where they stood in their deliberations last week after sending two notes to the federal judge presiding over the case the previous week.
Holmes, 37, is facing 11 criminal charges alleging that she duped investors and patients by hailing her company’s blood-testing technology as a medical breakthrough when in fact it was prone to wild errors.
Before those problems were exposed in 2015 and 2016, Holmes briefly realized her aspirations for fame and fortune while raising more than $900 million from a list of renowned investors that included media mogul Rupert Murdoch, software mogul Larry Ellison and the Walton family behind Walmart.
At Theranos’ height, Holmes had amassed a fortune of $4.5 billion on paper and was being lionized as a visionary on cover stories in business magazines.
But most people didn’t know Holmes’ dirty secret back then: Theranos’ blood-testing technology kept producing misleading results, forcing the company to secretly rely on conventional machines made by Siemens in a traditional laboratory setting. Evidence presented at the trial also showed Holmes lied about purported deals that Theranos had reached with big drug companies such as Pfizer and the U.S. military.
The deception eventually backfired in 2015 after a series of explosive articles in The Wall Street Journal and a regulatory audit of Theranos’ lab uncovered potentially dangerous flaws in the company’s technology.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
