DEDHAM — Karen Read’s defense team acknowledged on Tuesday that they ultimately paid important witnesses after her trial last year, but denied insinuations that they had misled the court.
In a lengthy and tense hearing, defense attorneys and prosecutors traded serious accusations of dishonesty. This comes at a critical juncture for Read, who is set to face a retrial in April on charges of murdering her boyfriend, Boston Police Officer John O’Keefe, three years ago by drunkenly striking him with her SUV and leaving him for dead.
“There’s a lot at stake here,” said defense attorney Robert Alessi, who argued that his fellow defense attorneys had not lied to the court about the witnesses and, therefore, should not be punished.
Judge Beverly Cannone has scheduled another three days of hearings for next week as she considers next steps.
The arguments on Tuesday centered around Read’s lawyers’ interactions with the firm ARCCA. The company was originally commissioned by federal authorities to probe the case. After federal authorities, who did not bring any charges, turned over thousands of pages of material to both sides in the ongoing state murder case, the defense called two ARCCA employees to the stand; they testified that they did not believe O’Keefe’s injuries were consistent with a vehicle strike.
At the time, the defense attorneys presented Philadelphia-based ARCCA as a disinterested third party. They said Read’s team was not paying them, and had not been allowed to coordinate with them. But during a hearing last week, special prosecutor Hank Brennan said the defense had turned over documents showing that ARCCA had sent the defense a proposed outline the day before testimony, and then a bill for nearly $24,000 after the trial ended.
Cannone, appearing unnerved, decided to probe the issue further. She specifically singled out attorney Alan Jackson, saying she would have questions about his previous statements about the witnesses.
On Tuesday, Alessi, who was not involved with the first trial, spent hours laying out a timeline that he said showed that his fellow defense attorneys had been honest. He said the bill from the firm had come unexpectedly “out of the blue” after the trial. Jackson then contacted the US attorney’s office to ask if they were allowed to pay the bill, which federal prosecutors said they could. Alessi confirmed that they then paid the bill.
Alessi also stressed that ARCCA’s findings were “in cement,” not changing after Read’s lawyers contacted them.
“The findings never changed one iota,” Alessi said. He said that Brennan, the special prosecutor who also was not involved in the first trial, gave the court “a completely counterfactual rendition” of what happened.
But Brennan pushed back, saying there is a “murky relationship” between the defense, federal prosecutors, and ARCCA.
“We had witnesses that were wholly portrayed as independent,“ Brennan said. “We are getting a fraction of the story. A fraction.”
Read, who turns 45 on Wednesday, has been at the center of one of the most high-profile trials in Massachusetts in years. High interest in the trial, which garnered international headlines, was driven by claims of government corruption and dueling narratives about the death of a police officer.
Prosecutors said she killed O’Keefe in a drunken rage and left him for dead outside the home of a fellow Boston cop as the couple’s relationship was falling apart. But Read’s lawyers say she was framed — that O’Keefe was beaten by people in the home and attacked by the family dog before his body was dumped on the front lawn.
Sean Cotter can be reached at sean.cotter@globe.com. Follow him @cotterreporter. Travis Andersen can be reached at travis.andersen@globe.com.
