Jurors within the Karen Learn homicide trial enjoying out in a Dedham court docket are more likely to deliberate her destiny early this week.
Protection attorneys David Yannetti and Alan Jackson informed the Herald they anticipate to complete with their witnesses Monday, with closing arguments from each side anticipated Tuesday. Learn’s protection referred to as three witnesses on Friday after the prosecution rested its case.
First up was Canton snowplow driver Brian Loughran, who mentioned he noticed a unique car outdoors the yard, the place sufferer John O’Keefe could be discovered useless or dying, throughout a important time. Subsequent was Dr. Marie Russell, who testified that wounds to O’Keefe’s arm appeared in her view to be canine bites and scratches, which factors towards the protection’s third-party killer concept. Lastly, Richard Inexperienced, a pc forensics professional who testified {that a} key witness named Jennfier McCabe made a suspicious Google search hours earlier than O’Keefe’s physique was discovered, which the protection says factors towards conspiracy.
Protection attorneys mentioned they may name three extra witnesses Monday: their very own forensic pathologist, Dr. Frank Sheridan; and two scientists from the forensic consulting agency ARCCA, Daniel Wolfe and Andrew Rentschler, who had been initially employed within the federal probe of the Learn investigation and can testify to their conclusions about whether or not Learn struck O’Keefe together with her car.
Prices and theories
Learn, 44, faces expenses of second-degree homicide, motorized vehicle manslaughter and leaving the scene of a collision inflicting the dying of John O’Keefe, her boyfriend and a 16-year Boston Police officer when he died at age 46 within the early morning hours of Jan. 29, 2022.
Prosecutors have argued that taillight items discovered on the snowy scene of O’Keefe’s dying on the entrance garden of 34 Fairview Street in Canton, heavy consuming the night earlier than, and a demonstrated historical past of jealousy and unrest within the relationship between Learn and O’Keefe factors to her guilt. Prosecutor Adam Lally argues the Mansfield monetary analyst and Bentley College lecturer purposely struck him together with her automotive as she dropped him off at that home someday after midnight.
However protection attorneys say that one thing a lot darker and complicated is afoot. In pretrial arguments, they pointed towards others within the residence beating O’Keefe to dying and framing Learn in a large cover-up — a mix of each police incompetence and willful bias. Whereas they had been barred from making their third-party killer concept a central tenet of their opening arguments, they’ve, by way of cross-examination and the primary three of their anticipated six witnesses, tried to forged heavy doubt on the integrity of the case.
‘A rational jury’
“The court must consider … whether a rational jury could find the elements of the charges beyond a reasonable doubt,” Jackson mentioned in arguing a movement for acquittal after Lally rested his case Friday. “Here, the case the Commonwealth has submitted to the jury after resting is insufficient to meet such a finding.”
The movement, which was made with out the jury current and which Decide Beverly Cannone denied, was a kind of roadmap to the case the protection would make with their very own witnesses.
Jackson mentioned that the prosecution’s “entire case relies on a theory built on the shoulders of a trooper named Joe Paul,” a Massachusetts State Police crash reconstructionist who started his two days of testimony on June 14. Paul testified that information he obtained from the computer systems about Learn’s Lexus LX570 SUV along side O’Keefe’s accidents had been “consistent with a pedestrian strike.”
“And his theory … is that John O’Keefe’s arm was struck, he was spun around in sort of a pirouette, he was projected 30 feet to the left, hit his head on the curb or the road in the intervening time before coming to a final resting spot about 30 feet away,” Jackson mentioned in his argument. “Calling a witness to simply espouse an opinion, like Trooper Paul did, that belies science, common sense or even logic, that’s not enough to get the case to the jury.”
Jackson additional mentioned that the prosecution’s personal witness, state health worker Dr. Irini Scordi-Bello, testified that in “her professional opinion, the injuries are not classic pedestrian injuries and they are, every single one of them, consistent with a physical altercation.”
Pushing again
Prosecutor Lally has carried out his cross-examinations of the protection witnesses with an vitality hardly ever current in his direct examination of his personal witnesses.
For Loughran, Lally introduced up a time the plow driver struck a basketball hoop whereas doing his rounds. The witness’ porous reminiscence of the occasion and his incapacity to keep away from the impediment whilst he tried to, Lally instructed by way of his questioning, pointed towards unreliability of his account of seeing a unique automotive outdoors 34 Fairview Street the night time of O’Keefe’s dying.
For Russell, Lally questioned her credentials and expertise in pathology, making her admit she hadn’t carried out an post-mortem for the reason that mid-Nineteen Nineties. He additionally instructed that she jumped to conclusions when she first heard of the case and failed to contemplate different prospects.
“I’m an ER doctor, I have to make a diagnosis quickly. I am trained to do that. That’s my specialty,” Russell mentioned throughout the mildly combative backwards and forwards.
Nevertheless it was Inexperienced that Lally dressed down probably the most in cross. Inexperienced’s testimony that Jennifer McCabe looked for “hos long to die in cold” at 2:27 a.m. on Jan. 29, 2022, differs from that of the Commonwealth’s specialists, Jessica Hyde and Ian Whiffin, two specialists Inexperienced mentioned he knew and who he clearly revered. They each testified that she made the search at 6:34 a.m., as she mentioned she did on the behest of Learn as the ladies had been close to O’Keefe’s physique within the snow.
