Prosecutors fight expert’s ‘baseless claim’ at Karen Read hearing

Posted at 12:28 PM, January 31, 2025

DEDHAM, Mass. (Court TV) — Prosecutors came out swinging at one expert witness at a hearing Friday, calling his work “forensically and scientifically unsound” as they fight to have him barred from Karen Read’s upcoming murder retrial.

Karen Read sits between Alan Jackson and David Yanetti

Karen Read sits between her attorneys, Alan Jackson and David Yanetti, during a hearing on Jan. 31, 2025. (Court TV)

Read is charged with the second-degree murder of her boyfriend, Boston Police Officer John O’Keefe, who was found dead in the snow outside of a friend’s home after a night out drinking. Read has claimed she is innocent and the victim of a wide-ranging cover-up. She stood trial on the same charges in 2024, but it ended in a mistrial when the jury could not reach a unanimous verdict.

Scheduled to begin on April 1, the retrial will feature many of the same witnesses as the first trial, but Special Prosecutor Hank Brennan wants a key defense witness, Richard Green, to be excluded. Green’s testimony at the first trial centered around Google searches done on witness Jennifer McCabe’s phone. McCabe, who Read’s defense has pointed to as being at the center of the alleged conspiracy, used her phone to search “how long ti die in cikd” and “hos long to die in cold,” but the question of when the searches were performed is central to the defense’s case. While the prosecution says the searches were done at Read’s request after 6:30 a.m. when O’Keefe’s body was found, the defense says the searches were performed at 2:27 a.m., before Read knew her boyfriend was missing.

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On Friday, Brennan asked Judge Beverly Cannone to schedule a Daubert hearing to challenge the admission of the evidence. A Daubert hearing establishes whether a proposed expert witness meets the necessary qualifications for their testimony to be admitted into court.

Brennan argued that Green’s testimony included “baseless claims” and was “an attempt, really, just to create confusion, to disparage and to make claims that are factually untrue.” Specifically, Brennan took issue with Green’s opinion that the 2:27 a.m. search was “deleted either by deliberate user interaction or manual post-imaging manipulation of the data by some unknown individual.”

It’s a suggestion that a witness, with no other evidence, was involved in a conspiracy to murder somebody. That’s the inference he wants the jury to hear,” Brennan said. “That’s an extraordinarily harsh claim when you don’t have any facts to back it up.”

Read’s newest attorney, Robert Alessi, argued that there is no need for a further hearing because Green is “eminently qualified,” and no objections were raised at the first trial to his opinions or methodology. Alessi further argued that there’s no need for a secondary hearing because the disagreement concerns Green’s opinion and not his methodology.

Judge Beverly Cannone said in a written order several hours after the hearing that she is comfortable making a decision about the motion without an additional hearing.

The defense has separately indicated that it plans to file a motion to dismiss the case but is waiting for additional discovery to do so. Judge Cannone told them they must file that motion by Feb. 11. The motion will be addressed at a hearing on Feb. 18.