Karen Read trial: April 28 (Week Two)

(I am providing daily posts on this site of the second trial of Karen Read. FYI, I am Professor of Law Emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin and I started my career out as an Assistant District Attorney for Middlesex County in Massachusetts)

The second week of testimony opened with the prosecution calling Ian Whiffin, a digital forensic expert, to testify on when a crucial search for “hos [how] long to die in cold” was made. The prosecution maintains that when Karen Read returned to 34 Fairview Rd around 6 a.m. on the morning of January 29, 2022, with her friends Kelly Roberts and Jennifer McCabe, Read asked McCabe to make that search. But the defense will try to show that the search was made at 2:27 a.m. by McCabe, which would be suspicious since at the time McCabe would have no reason to be making such a search. But Whiffin testified that the timing of the search to 2:27 a.m. was inaccurate, due to a lack of understanding of how a browser date stamps internet searches. Whiffin’s testimony was technical, but the essence was that McCabe opened tabs on her cell phone’s Safari browser at 2:27 a.m. to do searches irrelevant to this case and that the 2:27 a.m. time stamp simply got carried over to the “hos long to die in cold” around 6 a.m.

Whiffin also provided fascinating testimony reconstructing through McCabe’s cell phone his movements that night. The cell phone travels to 34 Fairview Rd shortly after midnight and then its movement stops around 12:31 a.m. near the flagpole on the lawn of 34 Fairview Rd.—the spot where O’Keefe’s body would later be found.

After lunch, the jury was dismissed for the day and the judge heard a hearing with a crash reconstruction expert who testified for the defense at the first trial, offering the opinion that O’Keefe’s injuries were not consistent with being struck by a car. At that trial, the defense led the jury to believe that the crash expert was independent and not paid to testify by the defense. This turned out to be false. The purpose of the hearing is to see if the defense has now turned over to the prosecution all relevant documents relating to its hiring of the crash reconstruction firm.