They never went back to the issue later. They were discussing whether a specific Apple patent should be invalidated because of the prior art. They were sick of dicussing it, so they just moved on. Hence, the patent was not invalidated.
I'm saying that we the news posts that we currently have don't give us enough context... the cnet post [1] doesn't explicitly say that they never went back to it. They explicitly decided that the patent was infringed, so they must have had some further discussions. From the article, though, it's hard to determine which patent they were talking about - likely '381.
I agree with you that the article doesn't give enough context. We can't know whether or not the jury came back to it. Though, by the same token I find your assumption that "they must have had _some_ further discussions" to be spurious for the same reasons. You're both reading assumptions into the quote.
The fact is, we can't really know whether they came back to it or not unless they tell us. I'm basically advocating that we can't assume the _did_ or _did not_ come back to it.
They never went back to the issue later. They were discussing whether a specific Apple patent should be invalidated because of the prior art. They were sick of dicussing it, so they just moved on. Hence, the patent was not invalidated.