Karen Read Retrial Update, Week 1.5: The Battle of the Dueling Experts Goes to the Defense

Boston Globe. Getty Images.

One thing that struck me (if you'll pardon the phrasing it that way in a motor vehicle homicide case) watching the HBO/Max docuseries A Body in the Snow, that the Karen Read case, like almost every trial of any kind, comes down to whom you believe. Which is hard enough to do when the evidence consists of something we can all relate to. Drinking and driving. A fight. Burglary. A marriage breaking up. And so on. Those are common life experiences we've all witnessed. But sorting fact from fiction is hard nevertheless. 

When the evidence presented is coming from witnessed declared "experts" by courts it can be extremely difficult. Now take two experts in the same field reaching different conclusions about a topic none of us normies can comprehend, and it becomes damned near impossible to know which to believe. 

That came up in the documentary. Just trying to determine what time Jen McCabe Googled "hos long to die in cold" - which is crucial to the timelines of both the prosecution and the defense - is a nightmare when each side puts their own expert on the stand and they reach two completely different conclusions. Especially when it's something so incomprehensibly technical as phone data retrieval. They might as well have been Jordie and Data talking about the impulse power on the Enterprise for all the Nerdspeak jargon they spewed. 

Now that we're into Commonwealth v. Karen Read 2: The Retrialing, we're revisiting two of the experts from the first trial in the series. The first, a witness called by the defense who's an expert on accident reconstruction and a DIY cannon enthusiast, Dr. Daniel Wolfe. The Crash Daddy, who turned a million True Crime-obsessed Wine Moms into Slip & Slides:

He was in court to start the week as part of a voir dire, which is an examination of a witness without the jury, to see if they're qualified to testify. The issue with Wolfe is that it was revealed that his crash reconstruction company ARCCA was, in fact, paid $28,000 by the defense team for his testimony in the first trial, and he wasn't just an independent witness who investigated this case on behalf of the DOJ. 

To the people convinced of Read's guilt, ADA Hank Brennan's examination of Wolfe was a masterclass of legal maneuvering. 

In almost ALL CAPS:

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To me though, it was more of a masterclass in nitpickery. Of semantics. Like debating what the meaning of "is" is. Except focused on how many times he had talked to the defense lawyers, four or five. Whether they spoke for two minutes or three and. Whether a text exchange constitutes a "conversation." 

Why they used Signal for texts (which is a discussion they've been having at the Pentagon), and why Wolfe deletes his old ones. Whether Wolfe testifying 18 times in the past means he was lying when he said he'd testified "about 20 times":

And pettiest of all, whether Wolfe and the attorney he referred to as "Alan" are friends, or just friendly, and asked "What would you call me?" Which the internet had a field day with:

Where all that is leading, only time will tell. Because then it was time to put another prosecution witness on the stand, Ian Whiffin, the Commonwealth's witness on cell phone data. I'll try to stick to the highlights, since his testimony was less like Star Trek: TNG technobabble and more like Einstein's quantum theory about the relatively of time. Literally, he talked in depth about how iPhones operate off of three separate clocks, all keeping different time. But instead of "A man gets on a spaceship and travels near the speed of light carrying a clock" thought experiments, it involved John O'Keefe's use of the Waze app. 

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I mean, I just pity some manager of a Shake Shack who answered a summons for jury duty and has to sort all this gobbledygook out for the next two-plus months:

Or this line of redirect questioning from Read's lawyer Robert Alessi:

…showed the timestamp of 2:27:40, Correct? 

IW:  Correct. RA: But that timestamp doesn't exist anymore. 

IW:  It doesn't exist today.  

RA:  as you sit here today, the Magnet Forensics program, Axiom (Cellebrite competitor) still shows the 2:27:40 a.m. timestamp, right? 

IW: As far as I know 

All we know about Cellebrite, the company he works for, is that they changed the way they operate on timestamp data specifically after the first trial. So we can trust them when they things like "hos long to die in cold" was at 6:30am, not 2:27am. Even though their competition says otherwise. Got it? I wish I did. Please explain it to me, and don't be afraid to talk like I'm 4 years old. Moving on.

If all this sounds like a draw to you, and you're wondering why I'm declaring victory on the day for Read's side, let me get right to that part. Most of Whiffin's testimony was focused on John O'Keefe's phone. When connected to the Bluetooth in Karen Read's SUV so they would Waze it to the Albert's house at 34 Fairview. When it disconnected. When it was moving. Whether it moving up or down in a way that indicated they were driving up a hill OR he was walking up a flight of stairs, which is a key distinction. The temperature of it. Though his expertise doesn't extend to what temperature water freezes at on the Farenheit Scale. Because the rest of the world is backwards, not us:

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Most of all, he spoke of where exactly O'Keefe was after he got out of the SUV. And Whiffen seemingly proved under direct examination that he never set foot in the Albert's house. Mathematically and scientifically:

Boom. There you have it. Irrefutable truth that Karen Read must have struck O'Keefe a fatal blow with her taillight. Because how can all the "third party culprit" theories about a fight in the house be accurate if he was never in the house? Open and shut case. Guilty on all counts. Right? 

Wrong. 

That testimony didn't survive cross examination from Alessi:

… be in the house, correct?  

IW: Based on the low accuracy information, Yes. 

RA: The answer is yes? 

IW: Yes.

So he couldn't have gone into the house until he could've gone into the house. Which doesn't of course prove he the theory he was beaten up, attacked by a dog, and dragged out to the side of the street to make it look like he got hit by a vehicle. But the fact the Commonwealth's own star witness just contradicted his own analysis by saying his 36 steps could've led him through the front door certainly doesn't hurt it any. 

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So Round 1 in the War to Settle the Expert Score goes to the defense on all three judges cards. And Crash Daddy still won't get his chance for a few weeks.

As I was starting this, Jen McCabe took the stand. She deserves a blog all her own. Probably once she's done testifying. There is no love lost between these two, and things are about to get ugly for sure: