Crime

Unsealed letters reveal DA’s communication with feds over Karen Read investigation

The letters confirm that a federal investigation into the murder case against Karen Read was still active as recently as last August.

January 23, 2024

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Multiple witnesses in the Karen Read murder case were called before a federal grand jury last spring as authorities probed the state’s investigation, a move Norfolk District Attorney Michael Morrissey labeled a “highly unusual and possibly abusive exercise of power.”

Morrissey’s complaint was included in a May 18 message to the U.S. Department of Justice, one of several letters between the DA’s office and federal authorities unsealed Monday in Norfolk Superior Court, where Read will stand trial in March.

The Mansfield woman is accused of backing her SUV into her boyfriend, Boston police officer John O’Keefe, and leaving him to die outside a home in Canton following a night out with friends in January 2022. Her defense team has pointed the finger at fellow afterparty guests, offering up a theory that O’Keefe was beaten inside the home and attacked by the family’s dog.

Amid reports of a federal investigation into the Read case, prosecutors previously filed a motion to seal several letters between Morrissey’s office and federal officials. Read’s lawyers pushed for the communication to be made public, and prosecutors later withdrew their motion.

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Defense attorney David Yannetti asserted in court last week that the letters show Morrissey is the investigation’s target — a claim the DA’s office ardently denied. Yannetti also said the communication will factor into an upcoming motion for sanctions against Morrissey, as well as a request to disqualify his office from continuing to prosecute Read’s case.

In a Friday court filing, Assistant Norfolk District Attorney Adam Lally wrote that prosecutors hoped that releasing the letters would correct the defense team’s “false impressions to the court and the public about the nature and substance of those letters and the extent of a federal investigation.”

Notably, the letters do not specify the focus of the federal investigation.

In one of the messages, Morrissey asks the DOJ Office of Professional Responsibility to look into federal prosecutors’ probe of the Read case and requested that, should the investigation continue, “it be transferred to another office without history of conflict, bias, and abuse of prosecutorial discretion.”

Morrissey mentioned one example where the DA’s office successfully collaborated with federal prosecutors on a decades-old murder case linked to Whitey Bulger’s gang. It was during that case, he alleged, that a federal prosecutor asked a Massachusetts State Police detective if he had any “damaging information” on Morrissey or the DA’s office.

Morrissey wrote that the federal prosecutor’s wife had been a prosecutor in the DA’s office, where her supervisors determined she needed “more seasoning and legal experience.” Offered the chance to gain more trial experience in district court, she instead resigned and filed an ethics complaint with the state’s Board of Bar Overseers, which subsequently dismissed it, according to Morrissey.

The DA also noted that his May 18 letter came just one day after federal watchdog reports found that former U.S. Attorney Rachael Rollins had abused the power of her office. Morrissey suggested that similar ethics concerns could be at play in the federal investigation into the Read case.

Rollins “has made no secret of her personal animosity toward me, including repeated crude, outlandish personal and professional attacks against me in the media during her time as Suffolk District Attorney,” Morrissey wrote.

The Office of Professional Responsibility forwarded Morrissey’s request to the Executive Office for United States Attorneys, which found “no basis” for recusing acting U.S. Attorney Joshua Levy from the investigation.

Levy’s office “has a very different opinion of the circumstances in this case than as presented in Mr. Morrissey’s letter,” General Counsel Jay Macklin wrote on Aug. 3. “His office has not reached any official determination whether prosecution is warranted, but they believe it is essential to continue their investigation given the information of which they are aware.”

In a statement Tuesday, Morrissey’s office said the letters “make plain that the District Attorney never asked that any investigation be ended.”

However, the DA, “along with many in the legal community, recognize that federal interference in an open state murder case is highly unusual if not unprecedented. In that light, District Attorney Morrissey’s letters spell out ample grounds to transfer that matter to a United States Attorney’s Office without a recent history of corruption, bias, conflict or the appearance of conflict of interest,” the statement reads.

Read is due back in court on Feb. 15.

Karen Read Case – Letters B…