Karen Read Retrial, Week 5: With the Prosecution About to Rest, Let's Look at Where the Commonwealth's Case Stands
MediaNews Group/Boston Herald via Getty Images. Getty Images.Even by the standards of the Karen Read homicide saga, it's been a strange week for Commonwealth v. Karen Read Part 2: The Retrialing. A wild couple of days of testimony that I'll circle back to in a moment. Followed by Wednesday when the cameras were shut off so that the judge and attorneys could speak to each juror at sidebar ("sidebahhh" in this courtroom) in an "individual voir dire." Which means on the record, though presumably out of earshot of everyone not directly involved in trying the case.
Most of the speculation has centered on the jurors themselves, with witnesses saying that every time there is a sidebah, some of them start chatting each other up, and Judge Cannone has admonished them that the lawyers are working hard to present this evidence, the trial is ahead of schedule, and politely reminding them to knock it off with the tone of an elementary school teacher reminding her students they have two ears and one mouth so they should talk twice as much as they listen.
Then the court took the unusual step of switching up the seating arrangement in the jury box. I say "unusual" because in literally hundreds of trials I worked from 1997-2014, I never remember that happening. Though to be fair, I wasn't really paying attention and wouldn't remember if I'd seen it. There were a lot of unforgettable Boston sports moments in those years, and they took up most of the limited data capacity in my brain. So one can only assume this game of Musical Jurors was to separate some of the more Chatty Cathys. Like in third grade when Mrs. Reilly put me and my buddy Mike in separate corners of the room because I wrote an essay about how I like to play chess, and I think she thought there was hope for me (not exactly) but Mike would grow up to be a degenerate (nailed it).
Once that business was out of the way, the judge surprised most people by calling it a week and telling the jurors not to come back until Tuesday. I say "most people," because the court staff couldn't have been taken aback by the move at all. As I've told you before, working for the Commonwealth means, "Have a great weekend" is something you hear on a Wednesday. You get especially used to hearing it before a holiday.
Maybe out of sheer boredom from getting only two days of evidence, I made the rookie mistake of engaging with people online about the retrial. Which is just inviting them to come at you from all directions like the Giants pass rush attacking Tom Brady in The Super Bowls That Shall Not Be Named, I & II. Most agreeing with me that the prosecution has done a pisspoor job in both trials. Some accusing me of peddling crazy conspiracies. And some Free Karen Read corner blitzers coming hard off the edge because I said I think protesting in the streets is a bad, counter-productive idea and at this point it's best to just let the court and jury do their jobs. They accused me of trying to "middle" this. Which I take to mean I'm standing exactly where I should be in this circus. Then again, as Mr. Miyagi put it, "Walk left side, safe. Walk right side, safe. Walk middle, sooner or later, get squished just like grape."
But here was by far my favorite comment:
You could show that post to a Inuit living off the land in above the Arctic Circle or someone from the indigenous tribe on that Pacific island where contact with the outside world if forbidden, and they'd say, "That had to have been written by a Masshole." I'm never deleting this app.
Anyway, the Commonwealth is expected to wrap up its prosecution early next week. With perhaps just one more witness left to call. That will give them a grand total of 38 witnesses over give-or-take 21 days worth of testimony. Way down from the total of 50 they called in Karen Read Trial: The Original Series. And with a pause in the action, it seems like as good a time as any to take an assessment of what they've presented to the jury so far. Beginning, awkwardly enough, at the end.
Week 5 kicked off with the single most cringe, secondhand embarrassment-inducing testimony in the history of jurisprudence. And things did not get better for Commonwealth "expert" witness Shanon "With Two Ns" Burgess once court was adjourned Monday. The academic credentials he lied about in his Curriculum Vitae:
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… have only taken more hits since he left the stand. He's like a pitcher who got shelled, left the bases loaded and keeps giving up earned runs while he's in the shower.
… Alabama-Birmingham, before he finally admitted today that he never graduated from there after 17 years.
However, Man Shanon is listed as a graduate in both the 2020 and 2021 UAB Commencement programs, where it says he majored in General Studies. How did UAB put him in their commencement program if he admitted today that he never graduated? Why did he previously pretend to go to Huntsville for 3 years? Why would anyone do 3 years at a University, and then instead of doing your last year and getting a Bachelor's degree you enrolled at a Community College, which takes 2 years instead of 1, and ends up with an Associate's degree instead of a Bachelor's?
Did this guy EVER actually attend college? Is he a professional scammer? Let's hope he's grilled about this tomorrow.
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As a reminder, this isn't exaggerating your accomplishments to impress a girl in a bar. Like Ben Affleck telling Minnie Driver he's in her History class. (Or when I used to tell them I was Darren Flutie, who played for BC but was a thousand times less recognizable than Doug.) This is a grown man padding his resume so he can qualify as an "expert" and testify against a woman accused of intentionally taking her boyfriend's life. A man who not only can't speak intelligently about the subject matter at hand, but who on Tuesday was exposed for not even being able to keep dates straight:
To again point out what this isn't. This isn't asking what today's date is or "Saturday? I thought we were going to your mother's Sunday. I made a tee time Saturday!" Shanon "With Two Ns" was brought in to use science to firmly establish, with precision accuracy, a timeline that proves beyond a reasonable doubt that Read intentionally backed her car into John O'Keefe for the purpose of murdering him. A matter of the utmost importance. Where seconds count. And he might as well have been off by the math in a Rent song:
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And in a country filled with digital data experts, the Commonwealth went on an exhaustive nationwide search to find Burgess. In order to convince a jury the data in her Lexus is wrong:
He might be off by 17 years on when he got his Bachelor's and by ~8,640 seconds on John O'Keefe's death. But on the time the "trigger" event was registered on Read's SUV, he's got that down with minute exactness. It's the high-end motor vehicle manufacturers who are lying to you. Make of that what you will, but it's hard to have listened to two days of this and not bang your forehead on the low bar that has "Reasonable Doubt" written on it.
Credit where it's due, the next witnesses the Commonwealth called were better qualified. Then again, that's hardly the standard you'd want to get judged by. But still.
Not that the first witness was a Rocket Scientist or anything. He's just a Brain Surgeon.
That's not Dr. Wolf. This is Dr. Wolf. The Commonwealth called witnesses out of order to accommodate his schedule. He had literally just flown up from Florida after performing a brain surgery and had another in the morning. Think about that the next time you come home exhausted from sitting in a cubicle all day:
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That is powerful testimony, indeed. From a Yale-educated doctor who be the perfect guy to play "Highly Respected Chief of Surgery" in any medical drama. Particularly when he mentioned he's practiced neurosurgery in Minneapolis, where one of the leading causes of head trauma are drunks falling on ice and whacking their skulls on frozen ground. The defense didn't spend more than a few minutes with the good doctor, but they did manage to get it on the record that he operates on actual living brains, and isn't a forensic pathologist who does autopsies. And he countered that less than 1% of his income is from testifying in trials.
Make of all this what you will. But when minds are already so made up in this case, I'm not sure Wolf's testimony moved the needle for many people. Not as much as it further convinced people who are already convinced how convinced they truly are:
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… Robert Alessi treated him accordingly.
In a tight 5-minute cross, Alessi got Wolf to admit that John’s facial injuries had nothing to do with a backward fall.
Which means… they came from something else. A fight, maybe? Hank Brennan clearly prepped this dope for a battle over his lack of pathology credentials.
But Alessi didn’t even bother.
Alessi might as well have just said:
‘Dr. Wolf, you may think very highly of yourself… but we don’t think about you at all. Have a safe flight home.’
It's all a matter of how much weight the jury gives to the testimony of an obviously highly qualified expert in his field, but not this exact one. Who knows a lot about head injuries, but just looked at photos of this one. And who seemed to provide a lot of "consistent withs," not "definitely wases."
Which is more or less what we got from their most recent witness on the subject of glass and taillight fragments:
Boston.com - Massachusetts State Police Crime Lab forensic scientist Christina Hanley walked jurors through test results she said deemed Karen Read’s taillight consistent with bits of red and clear plastic found in debris from John O’Keefe’s clothing.
As he stepped up for cross-examination, however, defense attorney Alan Jackson confirmed Hanley wasn’t saying conclusively that the plastic in the debris had come from Read’s taillight.
“It may have come from a taillight. It may not have,” he suggested.
“It’s a possibility,” Hanley acknowledged.
Answering subsequent questions from Jackson, she testified she wasn’t sure the SUV’s taillight was entirely plastic, or whether it might have contained glass. Jackson asked Hanley whether she had seen biological material like skin or blood on any of the evidence she examined, and she said that would fall outside her area of expertise.
“I don’t think I noted anything that would be consistent with that,” she added.
At Jackson’s prompting, she confirmed one of the five pieces of glass found on Read’s bumper was consistent with a shard ex-Trooper Michael Proctor recovered from 34 Fairview Road. …
“So in sum, not a single piece of glass on that bumper could be connected to that cup, correct?” Jackson asked.
“There was no physical match to the pieces that I compared for physical match from the bumper. There was no physical match to the glass cup,” Hanley replied.
Again, could be, not definitely is. The MSP's own crime lab expert can't say with conviction whether the pieces found in John O'Keefe's clothing came from the taillight the MSP says took his life. Which won't satisfy anyone, not the least of whom are the people digitally putting the taillight together like a Survivor puzzle challenge to suggest former MSP Trooper Michael Proctor planted evidence:
Which brings us, at long last, to the witnesses the Commonwealth hasn't called. Beginning with Michael Proctor, who's been fired from his job after the first trial. ATF Agent Brian Higgins, who was at the scene of the Waterfall bar in the hour before O'Keefe was injured and had been exchanging clumsy flirting texts with Read. Then went to his office at the Canton Police Department an hour after O'Keefe was left for dead by somebody. And Brian Albert, whom you think would be someone the jury might need to hear from since he was also Boston PD and owned the property where his fellow officer died. The fact none of them have been called by the DA's office that is trying to prove Read's guilt speaks volumes. It's the Sherlock Holmes "dog that didn't bark." Which, come to think of it, begs ALL the questions about Albert's German Shepherd Chloe.
That's where the prosecution is as we head into the long weekend. Meaning we're a couple of work days away from getting the defense's case. Read herself promised a "more robust" defense that is "broader and deeper" than the first trial. Have a great Memorial Day weekend. Then buckle up. I think we're in for a hell of a show when this all resumes Tuesday.