Karen Read is due back in court on Wednesday afternoon as the date of her murder trial draws closer.
Read — accused of killing John O’Keefe, her Boston police officer boyfriend, in Canton, Massachusetts, in 2022 — last appeared in court on March 12, where her attorneys argued the case should be dismissed and Norfolk District Attorney Michael Morrissey disqualified from the case. Judge Beverly Cannone has yet to rule on those motions and the trial remains set for April 16.
Defense attorneys argued prosecutors engaged in “deception” and that the DA isn’t a “neutral, impartial prosecutor,” while an assistant district attorney called the defense’s strategy “a three-card monte trick”
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Defense attorney Alan Jackson argued during last week’s hearing that the criminal charges against Read should be dismissed because prosecutors and their investigators distorted evidence on multiple occasions. He said several of the police investigators involved in the case, including Canton Police Sgt. Michael Lank and Massachusetts State Police Trooper Michael Proctor, had longstanding relationships with witnesses in the case and that was never mentioned to grand jurors.
“That conflict was never described to the grand jury and we’ve been rebuffed at every single turn,” he said.
Jackson referred to text messages between Proctor and a family member about having a relative of one of the witnesses in the case babysit for his toddler. He also cited another text sent from Proctor’s sister to Proctor where his sister referenced a member of that same family saying, “when all this is over she wants to give you a thank you gift.”
One day after the March 12 hearing, Massachusetts State Police confirmed that Proctor is being investigated for a potential violation of department policy but would not comment on what the investigation entails.
The trial against Karen Read, charged with the murder of her Boston police officer boyfriend, was pushed back until April after federal prosecutors shared thousands of pages of new documents.
Jackson also said that Proctor used a Canton police officer who is related to a key witness to help coordinate with witnesses.
And in what he called “the most obvious distortion of facts,” Jackson said prosecutors hid the fact that one of the witnesses in the case had made a Google search for “ho[w] long to die in cold” at 2:27 a.m. on the night O’Keefe was killed.
“Any one of these examples would be enough to dismiss the charges as they sit here today, but the cumulative effect of this deception is too much for the court to ignore,” Jackson said in asking for the dismissal of the indictment.
Monday is the final pretrial hearing for Karen Read, who is accused of killing her Boston police officer boyfriend in Canton, Massachusetts, back in 2022.
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But Assistant District Attorney Adam Lally countered that the defense is just trying to distract from the evidence pointing to Read being the killer.
“The defense is trying to say, ‘Look the other way.’ It’s a three-card monte trick. ‘Look at this relationship, look at that relationship.’ The defense is obfuscating from the extensive evidence. They don’t want you to look at that. They want you to look at who texted who when,” he said.
Defense attorney David Yannetti also argued a separate motion to disqualify Morrissey from prosecuting the case, based mostly on a video the district attorney released last summer condemning the harassment of witnesses in the Read case.
“DA Morrissey has an interest in this case not to do justice, but to win,” Yannetti said. “My client deserves a neutral, impartial prosecutor. Morrissey isn’t that. That is why he should be disqualified.”
But Lally said Morrissey released the video specifically because key witnesses in the case were being harassed and he wanted to put a stop to it.