The choose within the Karen Learn case unleashed a flurry of ultimate motions rulings forward of the trial’s begin on Tuesday.
Learn, 45, of Mansfield, is accused of hanging Boston Police Officer John O’Keefe, 46, her boyfriend of about two years, along with her SUV and leaving him to freeze and die in a significant snowstorm on the entrance garden of 34 Fairview Highway in Canton. She is charged with second-degree homicide, manslaughter whereas working a motorcar below the affect, and leaving the scene of an accident inflicting dying.
The protection has hotly contested the allegations in opposition to Learn and has as a substitute mentioned throughout her earlier trial, which resulted in a mistrial final summer time, and ever since that she is a patsy in a police cover-up and conspiracy.
Most of the motions Choose Beverly J. Cannone dominated on Thursday need to do with proof concerning a possible coverup and the protection’s concept that O’Keefe was killed by others — and presumably a canine named Chloe — inside the house at 34 Fairview Highway.
Cannone will enable a protection skilled to take a forensically sound extraction of a video file depicting the sallyport storage of the Canton Police Division on Jan. 29, 2022, the day of O’Keefe’s dying and when police took Learn’s Lexus SUV as proof. The protection has prompt a State Police trooper was meddling with the car’s passenger-side taillight and that the video may show it. The skilled can’t, nevertheless, obtain your complete “Canton Police Detective File.”
Cannone may also restrict prosecution skilled Dr. James Crosby’s testimony from excluding Chloe the canine totally from being the reason for disputed accidents to O’Keefe’s arm. She is going to, nevertheless, enable him, as a “clearly qualified expert,” to testify “as to the anatomy of a canine mouth or of Chloe in particular including measurements of her mouth.”
The choose will enable protection skilled Garrett Wing, who she mentioned “appears to be qualified by experience to provide some help to the jury on some issues in dispute.”
Lastly, Cannone orders that the protection flip over to the prosecution all of its proof concerning two specialists from a forensic science agency known as ARCCA by 5 p.m. Friday. They may also by that deadline need to disclose whether or not any fee is anticipated to be made to the specialists for his or her testimony, which occurred finally trial however was not disclosed. They’ll have till Monday to reveal “any testing underway, requested; or contemplated” by their staff and the ARCCA witnesses.
Photograph By Matt Stone/Boston Herald
Karen Learn trial Choose Beverly Cannone speaks to potential jurors on April 8 at Norfolk Superior Court docket. (Photograph By Matt Stone/Boston Herald)
