Karen Read and her protection group, and the lots of public and media following the advanced case surrounding the alleged homicide of Boston Police officer John O’Keefe, descended on Norfolk Superior Court this morning the place the Mansfield girl argued to throw out the case all collectively.
The morning listening to, which was till just lately scheduled as the start off the trial, started with protection lawyer Alan Jackson’s argument for a dismissal of the indictment. Jackson pointed towards what he described as shut relationships between the investigating police and Brian Albert, the then-owner of 34 Fairview Road in Canton the place O’Keefe’s physique was discovered within the snow in late January 2023.
Read is charged with the homicide of O’Keefe, her boyfriend of two years. Prosecutors say that she struck him with the rear of her Lexus SUV exterior the Albert dwelling following an evening out consuming in town.
But Jackson mentioned that from the start, the investigation was compromised, a concept he says is bolstered by federal grand jury testimony from a number of the investigating officers who he mentioned admitted that that they had lied about their relationship to principal state witnesses within the case. The federal experiences in addition to the protection filings that reference Jackson’s assertions stay sealed.
Jackson mentioned that Massachusetts State Police Trooper Michael Proctor, the principal investigator within the case, has an intensive historical past with the Alberts and had even texted Julie Albert to have her babysit his youngster at one level. Even extra compromising, he mentioned, was that Julie Albert had texted Proctor to supply a “thank you gift” for his dealing with of the investigation, a proposal that Proctor not solely didn’t decline and report back to the DA however requested to for an additional reward for his spouse, Elizabeth.
Jackson additionally argued that prosecutors had didn’t carry up what he known as probably the most highly effective piece of exculpatory proof: that Jennifer McCabe, Albert’s sister-in-law, made a Google seek for “ho[w] long to die in cold” earlier than O’Keefe’s physique was discovered.
“Any one of these examples, the gift giving, the babysitting, the Google extraction… would be enough to dismiss the indictments, but the cumulative effect is too much for the court to ignore,” Jackson mentioned. “It just didn’t give Karen Read a fair shot. It just didn’t.”
Prosecutor Adam Lally mentioned in response to the protection’s argument, “Essentially it’s a three-card monty trick … look at this relationship, look at that relationship. A distortion of the facts in a way that lives in the social media realm.”
He mentioned it’s a distraction from the purpose of the matter because the commonwealth sees it: “(Everything) indicates that the defendant, Karen Read, killed John O’Keefe.”
Next up was protection lawyer David Yannetti, who has represented Read from the start, with an impassioned argument that Norfolk District Attorney Michael Morrissey, in releasing a press release to the general public on the matter, behaved so recklessly and with unprofessional bias that not solely ought to he be sanctioned however that his workplace ought to be disqualified from prosecuting the case.
He mentioned that Morrissey’s feedback, which he mentioned impugned the protection’s third-party culpability concept and unfairly vouched for state witnesses in a manner that just about discover’s Read’s guilt a reality, was in response to a change within the construction of a case pretrial. Usually, Yannetti argued, prosecutors are “used to controlling the narrative,” whereas “the defense remains quiet and the media usually loses interest until the trial.”
“In this case, their control of the narrative didn’t last long,” Yannetti mentioned, including that the protection had taken an unusually investigative and outspoken posture in protection of Read as a result of they believed the proof was so robust in her protection.
“In his own words, DA Morrissey said he has an interest in this case that goes beyond the interests of justice,” Yannetti mentioned. He added that the video assertion, reported at size in regional media, as demonstrated by a really thick packet of reports story printouts Yannetti held up, was — he leaned nearer to the microphone — “an outrage.”
The dramatic bit drew some snickers from the right-side of the courtroom’s gallery, which was principally crammed with those that assist the prosecution’s model of occasions and exhibit their partisanship on the matter with yellow “Justice for JJ” pins. O’Keefe’s supporters present a counterbalance to the opposite aspect’s “Free Karen Read” t-shirts and copious indicators.
Lally mentioned that Morrissey’s assertion was “in conformity with the rules of professional conduct.” The assertion was made, he mentioned, as a response to “relentless” badgering of state witnesses, which included individuals driving by individuals’s homes and calling them ‘murderers.’
This is a growing story.
Source: www.bostonherald.com”