Norfolk Superior Court docket Choose Beverly Cannone is sitting tight on deciding whether or not Karen Learn’s protection can use its most well-liked canine chunk skilled in her second trial scheduled to start in April.
After yet one more marathon listening to to find out the destiny of Dr. Marie Russell’s testimony within the retrial, Cannone took the prosecutors’ request to exclude the canine chunk skilled beneath advisement.
“She doesn’t have the qualifications, she doesn’t have the experience, she doesn’t have the methodology,” Particular Prosecutor Hank Brennan advised Cannone on the finish of Tuesday’s listening to.
“But a willingness to tell opinions that are speculative, factually wrong, not based in science and math, should disqualify her from giving another baseless opinion about a so-called dog bite wound,” Brennan added.
Russell, a retired emergency room physician at a Los Angeles-area hospital ranked within the prime tier for trauma circumstances, maintained that in her skilled opinion, canine bites triggered the injuries to John O’Keefe’s physique, and the associated holes and tears within the clothes he wore on Jan. 29, 2022, the morning of his dying.
Russell, who additionally labored as a forensic pathologist and health worker, continued to reject {that a} motorized vehicle crash triggered the injuries which is how the prosecution says Learn killed O’Keefe, saying that none of them observe the everyday patterns of a motorized vehicle strike.
Brennan grilled Russell over the “standards” and “methodology” that she utilized in concluding {that a} canine triggered the abrasions to O’Keefe’s proper arm.
“You have personal experience in that you treated dog wounds and you’re looking at it and you’re simply deciding to you that this looks similar,” Brennan stated to Russell. “You’re giving your personal aside, aren’t you?”
Russell responded: “I actually find that offensive.”
Minutes later within the heated cross-examination, Brennan advised Russell was counting on her “subjective opinion.”
“With all due respect, Mr. Brennan, I’m not somebody who just came off the street,” she advised him. “I have at least 30 years as a physician, and I use that information in helping me form my opinions about wounds. I’ve seen all types of wounds.”
Brennan then delved into whether or not Russell would alter her stance if she knew Learn advised Boston Journal that “maybe John hit the back of her car telling her to stop, and that she ran over his foot or she clipped him in the knee, and in his drunkenness he passed out?”
“It wouldn’t help, because those wounds were caused by a dog,” Russell stated.
Russell testified to the identical opinion throughout the first trial that ended in the summertime with a hung jury,
Prosecutors say that Learn, 44, of Mansfield, struck caO’Keefe along with her Lexus SUV following an evening of consuming and yet one more argument of their fraught two-year relationship and left him to freeze and die on the entrance garden of 34 Fairview Street in Canton, the place the pair had been presupposed to take part in an after occasion after the bars on the town had closed.
She faces prices of second-degree homicide, motorized vehicle manslaughter whereas working beneath the affect, and leaving the scene of an accident inflicting dying.
The protection countered with their very own concept of the case, positing that not solely is Learn harmless however that others are accountable for O’Keefe’s homicide.
One concept they hinted at within the trial is that folks inside the house, presumably together with then-homeowner Brian Albert, a fellow Boston cop, beat O’Keefe to dying after which used their affect on the town to border Learn. In addition they stated that Albert’s canine, a German shepherd named Chloe which the household has since surrendered, participated within the assault.
“If you ran an artificial intelligence program, you couldn’t come up with a more perfect witness for the subject matter of this testimony,” Protection Legal professional Robert Alessi advised Cannone. “The crucial issue of whether she is qualified, to me, is 100% in her favor.”
At trial, the protection had three different specialists who additionally concluded that O’Keefe’s wounds couldn’t have come from a motorized vehicle strike.
Brennan filed a movement Tuesday looking for to additionally block two of these specialists, crash reconstructionists Daniel Wolfe and Andrew Rentschler, from testifying once more within the second trial set for April.
The case will proceed Jan. 31.
