Jury Selection Begins in Theranos Founder Elizabeth Holmes’s Trial

Source: WSJ:

August 31, 2021 at 10:31

U.S. prosecutors and the onetime Silicon Valley star’s lawyers are scrutinizing a pool of nearly 200 to find 17 jurors.

As the long-awaited trial of Theranos founder and former CEO Elizabeth Holmes gets underway, WSJ looks back at the scandal’s biggest milestones and speaks with legal reporter Sara Randazzo about what we can expect to see in the fraud trial. Photo Illustration: Adele Morgan/WSJ

SAN JOSE, Calif.—Theranos Inc. founder Elizabeth Holmes heads to court Tuesday, as her legal team seeks to help assemble a group of impartial jurors to weigh the criminal-fraud charges filed against her, a task her lawyers say is challenging, given her case’s notoriety.

Ms. Holmes’s legal team and prosecutors with the U.S. attorney’s office for the Northern District of California have been scrutinizing a pool of nearly 200 potential jurors to find the 17 needed to serve on the four-month-long trial.

The onetime Silicon Valley star faces a dozen counts of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud for what prosecutors say were misleading statements made to investors and patients about Theranos’s technology. She has pleaded not guilty.

Government lawyers will set out to prove at the trial that Ms. Holmes intended to defraud the two groups. Ms. Holmes could argue that she believed in Theranos’s technology and that the company was on its way to living up to its promises.

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