Pink-clad supporters of Karen Read who spent years protesting her prosecution on highway overpasses and in traffic rotaries reacted with jubilation on Wednesday when a Massachusetts jury acquitted her of murder and manslaughter charges.
Others who believed that Ms. Read was guilty of killing her boyfriend, a Boston police officer, in 2022, and scoffed at defense claims of a police cover-up, came away disheartened and frustrated.
But people on each side of the hotly debated, long-running legal drama could, in the end, agree on one thing: The police investigation into the death of the officer, John O’Keefe, was deeply flawed, plagued by unethical and unprofessional conduct, and was a likely factor in the jury’s rejection of the prosecution’s case.
“People have an expectation that investigations will be fair and diligent, that public servants will do right by us, procedurally, and respect our rights,” said Eric Faddis, a former prosecutor in Denver who followed the trial. “The evidence showed that Karen Read didn’t receive a fair shake from police, and I think the jury saw that as polluting the whole case.”
Ms. Read’s lawyers, in arguing that the investigation was unfair, had accused police officers who handled the case of planting evidence and protecting witnesses with ties to law enforcement.
In an interview with ABC’s “20/20” that was released after the verdict, the case’s lead investigator, Michael Proctor, denied that he had planted evidence to frame Ms. Read.
“Absolutely not,” said Mr. Proctor, a Massachusetts state police trooper who was later fired by the state. He added, “It’s something I would never do, I’ve never done, and there’s no evidence of it.”
Col. Geoffrey Noble, who leads the Massachusetts State Police, said in a statement on Thursday that the events since 2022 had “challenged our department to thoroughly review our actions and take concrete steps to deliver advanced investigative training, ensure appropriate oversight, and enhance accountability.
“Under my direction as colonel, the state police has, and will continue to improve in these regards,” he said.
The district attorney’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
The long-awaited verdict on Wednesday, which came after a mistrial last year in which the jury failed to reach a consensus, found Ms. Read guilty only of one lesser charge, driving under the influence. But it did not resolve the lingering questions about Mr. O’Keefe’s death in a blizzard in 2022.
On Jan. 29 of that year, Ms. Read and Mr. O’Keefe drove to a house party in Canton, Mass., 20 miles south of Boston, after a night out drinking. The prosecution argued that the couple was fighting, and that Ms. Read intentionally accelerated in reverse and hit her boyfriend after he stepped out of the car at the party. He was found unresponsive on the ground the next morning. She was charged with second-degree murder, manslaughter while operating under the influence of alcohol, and leaving the scene of an accident causing death.
From the start of Ms. Read’s first trial last year, defense lawyers sought to establish that a flawed police investigation had failed to rule out another possibility: that people at the party that night killed Mr. O’Keefe, dumped his body outside in the snow, and then conspired to make it look as if Ms. Read was responsible.
They raised questions about police procedures in the case: the use of red plastic Solo cups to collect blood samples from the yard where Mr. O’Keefe was found unresponsive; the use of a leaf blower to clear snow away from the scene, potentially disrupting evidence; the failure of investigators to search the party house for signs of foul play or to interview all the people who were there that night.
Most damning were the offensive text messages that Mr. Proctor sent to friends, and that he read aloud on the witness stand at the first trial. In them, he disparaged Ms. Read’s appearance, mocked her health problems and said that he hoped she would kill herself.
He also implied that the party’s host, another Boston officer, would not be scrutinized, after a friend asked him in one message if the homeowner would receive attention.
“Nope,” Mr. Proctor replied. “Homeowner is a Boston cop, too.”
Mr. Proctor was never called to testify in the retrial of the case, which was argued in Norfolk County, south of Boston.
“The lead investigator in a murder trial was never called as a witness,” Alan Jackson, a lawyer for Ms. Read, said in his closing argument last week. “Think about that — that should stop you in your tracks.”
In the ABC interview, Mr. Proctor said he regretted sending those texts.
“I shouldn’t even have been texting my friends anything,” he said. “They are what they are; they don’t define me as a person. They’re regrettable.”
For many watching the trial, the investigator’s conduct seemed to confirm their worst suspicions about the culture of law enforcement. Jessica Svedine, 36, who led weekly demonstrations in support of Ms. Read in a Cape Cod traffic rotary for more than a year, said the cause felt urgent because any citizen could be ensnared the same way.
“That could be me, or you, or your children,” she said at a protest in Plymouth, Mass., this spring, “and if we don’t stop it now, it will be.”
Jessica Atkins, a Boston resident, stood among hundreds of supporters outside the courthouse in Dedham on Wednesday — a crowd that cheered so loudly when the verdict was announced that the roar was clearly audible inside the courtroom. Ms. Atkins said she had put “blood, sweat and tears” into her fight for Ms. Read’s freedom.
“I don’t trust Norfolk County,” she said. “I don’t trust the Massachusetts State Police.”
But some said the prosecution might have succeeded had the investigation been more buttoned up.
Christina Miller, a former prosecutor in Boston and a clinical law professor at Suffolk University, said she saw evidence to support a manslaughter charge. But she said the failure to properly collect and preserve physical and digital evidence was a critical early error, compounded by Mr. Proctor’s messages that cast a shadow over the entire case. All that likely factored into the jury’s failure to find the evidence credible, she said.
“If the taillight pieces had been collected in a way that was forensically sound, if the investigator who should be neutral doesn’t appear to be biased,” she said, the verdict might have been different. “The tragedy is that we will never know the truth.”
The Norfolk County district attorney, Michael Morrissey, was also accused of overcharging Ms. Read with murder despite flaws in the investigation. He has faced repeated calls for his resignation, and candidates campaigning to replace him in an election next year have called for restoring professionalism and ethical standards to the office.
Several people who attended the house party in Canton the night that Mr. O’Keefe died called the verdict “a devastating miscarriage of justice.”
The group included Brian Albert, the party’s host, and Jennifer McCabe, a party guest whose Google search asking how long it takes to die in the cold was used by the defense to suggest that guests had plotted to cover up the murder. Each had testified for the prosecution.
Mr. O’Keefe and his family “deserved better from our justice system,” the group said in a joint statement on Wednesday.
Ms. Read’s supporters had long cited other Norfolk County cases to bolster their claims of police corruption, including that of Sandra Birchmore, a pregnant woman whose death in 2021 was initially ruled a suicide by local officials. Federal authorities later undertook their own investigation. Last year, they indicted a former Stoughton, Mass., police detective for killing Ms. Birchmore, 23, and staging a suicide to cover up the crime.
The current police chief in Stoughton, Donna M. McNamara, called the allegations “the single worst act of not just professional misconduct but indeed human indecency that I have observed in a nearly three-decade career in law enforcement.”
Daniel Medwed, a professor of law and criminology at Northeastern University, said the trooper’s texts in the Read case, and the disturbing details in the Birchmore indictment, had brought renewed attention to persistent problems in policing.
“If there has always been a sense that law enforcement is sometimes above the law, and that it’s police, and the powerful, who are being protected,” he said, “these examples fan the flames.”
Maya Shwayder contributed reporting.
Jenna Russell is the lead reporter covering New England for The Times. She is based near Boston.
The post Karen Read Acquittal Exposes Flaws in Police Practices, Supporters and Critics Say appeared first on New York Times.
