Under cross-examination by Holmes lawyer Kevin Downey, Edlin acknowledged that he was no expert in the technology used by Theranos, and had come to the company fresh out of college, where he majored in public policy.
Edlin, the former Theranos product manager, also testified Tuesday that Holmes met a doctor at a conference, who was invited to have his blood tested in a Theranos demonstration. A Theranos scientist found that human error was not the reason for the testing failure, Edlin said.
Jurors also saw email chains, which included Holmes, showing some inconsistent and possibly abnormal test results from Theranos demonstrations were removed before the results were reported. Directors found guilty of breaching the FCPA can be jailed for five years, though the penalty tends to be a large fine. In June , in an apparent attempt to isolate his TV and film assets from the hacking scandal, Murdoch split his media business into two: News Corp remained, but 21st Century Fox film studio and Fox News cable were hived off into a new corporation, 21st Century Fox.
Murdoch has spent his career keeping one step ahead of politicians and regulators. In the legal trench warfare in Court 12 of the Old Bailey, most of his executives — whose multimillion dollar legal fees were funded by his business — triumphed. But at 83, with his health, reputation and prospects more uncertain than in the past, he may find out that winning a battle does not necessarily mean you win the war.
Martin Hickman is a freelance journalist who co-wrote Dial M for Murdoch. There were masterclasses in the skills of advocacy from Edis as well as from some of those acting for those in the dock. Finally, the crown was hampered by the rules of court that allow it to make an opening statement but require it then to present items of evidence without any comment as to why they matter, a rule policed with ferocious efficiency by the Rolls-Royce defence teams.
In a normal case, where the prosecution might spend only three or four days presenting its case, that would not matter: the evidence would be relatively simple; it would be clear how each piece fitted into a picture. The crown had jumped from topic to topic, he said. It may have been patronising, but he had a point. The crown had spent months effectively throwing random bricks at the jury with little or no explanation as to how they fitted together.
This is not to say that the defendants had no problems. In pre-trial hearings, Brooks lost her lead barrister, John Kelsey-Fry QC, because the former royal editor, Clive Goodman, said he wanted to call him as a witness to the cover-up at his own trial for hacking in The judge agreed to delay the trial for seven weeks while she instructed Laidlaw — and that meant Coulson lost his barrister, Clare Montgomery QC, because the new timing overlapped with a case she had to conduct in Hong Kong.
The trial opened against a backdrop of public hostility to Brooks and Coulson, not only because of the high-profile hacking saga, but also because of their careers. Throughout the trial, the defendants were thrown off-course as the crown, struggling to keep up, served new evidence that should have been presented before the trial started.
Even as the final evidence was being put to the jury in April, the prosecution suddenly announced it had 48, email messages which the FBI had obtained from News Corp in New York; they had been with police in London for 16 months.
All this made the trial a peculiarly unpredictable contest. From the start, the crown case was weak, particularly against Rebekah Brooks. There was no direct evidence at all to implicate her in phone hacking. Indeed, there was simply a lack of any direct evidence about her of any kind.
That was partly because of the passage of time: she stopped being editor of the News of the World in January , so naturally paperwork and other evidence had been lost. Some had been destroyed. The hard drive had been removed from her computer for safe keeping then lost.
But there was no doubt at all that the News of the World had been involved in crime on a massive scale. Before the trial opened, three former news editors and the specialist phone-hacker Glenn Mulcaire had pleaded guilty to conspiring to intercept voicemails. Hundreds more alleged victims were still being identified by police. The hacking case against Brooks and Coulson was based on a platform of inference. How could they not have known about the beehive of offending around them, the crown asked.
How could they not have known the origin of all those stories whose accuracy they had to test? They had not even heard his name until he was arrested in August , they told the jury.
The evidence which lies at the core of the hacking scandal is the collection of notes found by detectives when they first arrested Mulcaire in August 11, pages of his barely legible scribble and scrawl and doodle. The original police inquiry took one look at it and decided it simply did not have the resources to go through it all.
When Operation Weeting in finally did the job properly, it took it the best part of a year. The notes showed that Mulcaire was tasked some 5, times during the five years that he worked on contract for the News of the World, an average of more than four for every working day. As a crude average, that would imply that between September , when he was contracted to work for the paper, and January , when Brooks left, he was commissioned around 1, times.
Where Brooks was concerned on the hacking charge, there was very little extra evidence to add to that platform of inference.
Three witnesses came to court and recalled social occasions when she had discussed hacking with apparent familiarity. Brooks told the jury that she had read about hacking in newspaper stories; she had talked about it casually because she had not realised it was illegal; but she would never have sanctioned it because it was such a severe breach of privacy.
One of these three witnesses — the former wife of the golfer Colin Montgomerie, Eimear Cook — was cut to pieces by a particularly destructive cross-examination. Cook told the jury she recalled a conversation at lunch in September , when Brooks had not only warned her that her own phone might be hacked but had described the ease with which it could be done. Cook added that during the same lunch, she thought Brooks had discussed the famous incident when she had been arrested for assaulting her then partner, the actor Ross Kemp.
Laidlaw gently pawed her into position, confirming without doubt the date of the lunch, challenging the strength of her memory until she insisted she was absolutely certain and then, like Hannibal Lecter in a horsehair wig, softly and courteously, he cut out her heart: the incident with Kemp had happened six weeks after the lunch. Her story could not possibly be right.
Then there was Milly Dowler. This was almost spooky. That was purely about the emotional impact of the story — that this was no celebrity victim, but an ordinary civilian, a child, and one who had been abducted and murdered by a predatory paedophile. Having picked up a voicemail which seemed to suggest that Dowler was alive and working in a factory in Telford, the News of the World not only hid that information from police but later, when they had failed to find her, they contacted Surrey police and demanded that they confirm the story for them — and quoted the voicemail, in phone calls and even in email.
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Home Business The trials of Rupert Murdoch. By Rodney E. Lever 26 November , am comments.
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