Opening statements in the Karen Read trial painted clearly different portraits of the defendant on Tuesday, with the Prosecutor’s Office claiming that she fatally hit her boyfriend with her SUV when her relationship was unraveled, while her lawyers argued that she was a victim of misconduct of the application of the law and a cover -up.
The theories echoed a large extent of those presented in the first widely publicized trial of Read for second degree murder and other alleged crimes on January 29, 2022, the death of the Boston police officer John O’Keefe. That nine -week trial ended with a jury hung last summer.
But there were notable differences in some of the details presented by prosecutors and defense lawyers on Tuesday.
Read has repeatedly pressed its case publicly, speaking with journalists outside the courtroom in recent weeks and giving long interviews for documentaries and a magazine history. The main prosecutor and special lawyer Hank Brennan said he intends to trust in his own words in what he called his “campaign to make public statements.”
“His statements will confirm what he knows about science and data,” Brennan told the jury. “You will know about their own lips, and many of his statements, his admissions to extraordinary poisoning … his admission to be angry with John that night.”
In a clip that Brennan played for the jury, he read, 45, he discussed O’Keefe’s death with “Datelline.” In the interview, Read said that “I could have labeled it in the knee and have been incapacitated. He did not seem mortally injured by what I could see. But could he have done something that knocked out?”
Prosecutors used the clip as a way of reinforcing the theory they have alleged about O’Kefe’s death: fed by anger and poisoning, reading supported their SUV Lexus in him after the couple had an argument. According to prosecutors, she left him dead outside Brian Albert’s house in the Boston area, then a police sergeant who was having a meeting to which O’Keefe was heading to his way.
Reading and his lawyers have said that he left O’Keefe in Albert’s house around midnight and saw him enter. According to the defense story, when read he learned hours later, he panicked after having discovered that O’Keefe never came home. She found him unanswered on the outskirts of Albert’s house around 6 am the next morning, she and her lawyers say.
Defensor lawyer Alan Jackson replied that the Brennan clip presented to the jury was without context. In Jackson’s revelation, the interview “Datelline” appeared as if Read was arguing what was going through his mind when he left O’Keefe at midnight, which he argued that it was not the case.
“She is talking about 6 in the morning when she found him,” Jackson said, added that similar statements he made to others were not confessions, but the words of a woman “desperately trying to put together what happened on this tragic night.”
The way in which the defense was able to address the former state soldier of Massachusetts, Michael Proctor, also marked a remarkable change.
Princer directed the investigation into the death of O’Kefe, and was fired after the accusations of misconduct raised during his first judgment caused an internal investigation of the State Police. A state panel concluded that he violated the agency’s rules when he sent derogatory texts on confidential reading details of reading and shared with the non -application personnel of the law.
Calling Proctor a “malignancy” that spread throughout the research on the death of O’Keefe and the Read prosecution, Jackson said there was no part of the case that Proctor had not touched.
“It has been dishonored by its own agency,” Jackson said. “Not for us. By the Massachusetts State Police, investigated, suspended and fired.”
Jackson accused Proctor of conducting a biased and “corrupt” investigation that protected the people with whom he had not revealed ties, including Albert, of being examined as possible suspects in the death of O’Keefe. (Albert testified during the first trial O’Keefe never entered his house on the night of his death, although he would have been “welcome with open arms” if he had done it).
Brennan did not mention Proctor in his opening statement, and the former soldier has not publicly commented on his termination. But his family said that the decision of the state panel “unjustly explodes and the scapegoats one of his, a soldier with an impeccable record of 12 years.”
During the first trial, Proctor acknowledged that his comments on reading it “dehumanized”, but said that his conduct did not compromise the integrity of the investigation.
