Karen Read Trial Aftermath: Prosecutor Criticizes Verdict

slams social media

(I will be posting less frequently here, as matters pertaining to the aftermath of the Karen Read trial wind down. However, I will be posting on other trials at jurynewsletter.substack.com and I hope you will subscribe to that.)

It is rare for a prosecutor to criticize a jury verdict. In defeat, the boilerplate line is “the jury has spoken.” In fact, Norfolk DA Michael Morrisey has issued no comment after the jury rendered its not guilty verdicts in the Karen Read trial.

But Hank Brennan, whom Morrisey appointed as a special prosecutor to lead the prosecution team in the retrial, has had plenty to say. The fact that Brennan is not a career prosecutor – he is in fact a defense attorney, whose most famous client before now was James “Whitey” Bolger—probably explains why he felt free to comment.

Brennan did not explicitly blame the jury for what he clearly considered a wrong verdict – of course he would think that. Instead, he singled out for criticism “the campaign of intimidation and abuse that has been waged, funded, and promoted in public and on social media.” Brennan did not say it, but he implied that what happened outside the courtroom somehow had more sway over the jury than what took place inside the courtroom. I may be wrong about this. Perhaps he accepts that the jury did its job and decided the case solely on the basis of the evidence, and all he means to suggest is that a great part of the public, and not the jury, was swayed by the social media campaign. Brennan expressed particular concern about attacks on witnesses for the prosecution, nothing that “we cannot condone witness abuse causing participants to worry for their own safety or that of their families.”

Brennan has this negative view of the role of social media in promoting Karen Read’s innocence only because, as he says in his statement, his own investigation convinced him that Karen Read, and no one else, killed John 0’Keefe.

The jury clearly did not share this certainty about Read’s guilt. We have yet to have a full account of why Brennan’s own certainty did not, in the jury’s view, find support in the evidence.

Every day of the trial, Judge Cannone warned the jurors not to access the case in the media, and we have not heard any evidence that any juror violated his or her instructions. One juror interviewed noted he could not help but notice the largely pro-Read crowd outside the courtroom when he arrived in the morning, but he said it did not influence him.

The question of social media influence on jurors and trials is an important one. Our rules for insulating jurors from media are pre-computer, pre-Internet, pre-smartphone, pre-Google search, pre-blog, pre-podcast. It may be that we need to rethink how to insulate jurors from the far more pervasive reach of media today than they had when the rules were first established.

Jeffrey Abramson, Professor of Government and Law Emeritus, Univ. of Texas at Austin, and author of We, the Jury: The Jury System and the Ideal of Democracy (Harvard Univ. Press).