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Who is on Karen Read’s defense team?
“I got into this business to right wrongs and there was no way I was going to walk away from this case.”
As Karen Read’s case winds its way through the courts, lawyers for the Mansfield woman — who stands accused of killing her Boston police officer boyfriend last year — have launched a full-throated defense.
They’ve held up larger-than-life autopsy photos during hearings, unleashed fiery rhetoric on the courthouse steps, and promoted a narrative that has drawn online support from thousands.
Prosecutors allege that Read, 43, struck John O’Keefe with her car on Jan. 29, 2022, and left him to die in the snow while dropping him off at an after-party following a night of drinking. Her lawyers, meanwhile, say she’s being framed.
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The bicoastal defense team at the center of this controversial case is spearheaded by Alan Jackson and David Yannetti, two heavy-hitting criminal defense attorneys with a track record of high-profile wins.
“These particular attorneys are extraordinarily experienced; they’re real legal heavyweights with a great deal of gravitas in the legal community,” Boston-based criminal defense attorney and legal expert Peter Elikann told Boston.com. “Exceptionally, highly respected lawyers. Veterans who have certainly been doing this for quite some time.”
Alan Jackson: ‘Proudly relentless’
A California lawyer who joined Read’s defense last September, Jackson often appears at-ease with the media attention her case has attracted, a skill likely honed over a career spent trying high-profile cases.
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As a prosecutor in Los Angeles, he secured a murder conviction against music producer Phil Spector in 2009 and won a guilty verdict in the cold-case murders of motorsports icon Mickey Thompson and his wife, Trudy.
After going into private practice following a failed bid for Los Angeles County district attorney in 2012, he represented disgraced Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein in his L.A. rape trial and actor Kevin Spacey in his Nantucket sexual assault case (prosecutors later dropped the Nantucket charges). Other big-name clients range from a Saudi prince to an NBA player.
In an email interview, Jackson said he became “intrigued” by Read’s case after initially speaking with her about obtaining cellphone data.
“Once I heard the full story of John’s death and saw some of the evidence, including the injuries on his right arm, I knew something was terribly wrong. I wanted to help,” Jackson said. “I got into this business to right wrongs and there was no way I was going to walk away from this case.”
He said he approaches every case with “the same vigor and pursuit of the truth,” regardless of whether the client is known or unknown.
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“The justice system is a system built for everyone — rich or poor, famous or anonymous, it doesn’t matter; we are all entitled to a zealous defense,” Jackson said. “Karen’s case resonates with me because the travesty of justice that has befallen her can happen to any one of us.”
Asked to describe his courtroom style, Jackson called himself “a trial lawyer at heart.”
“That means I am unafraid to ruffle feathers in order to get to the truth,” he continued. “My job is to test evidence, question assumptions, and speak truth [to] power. In a courtroom, I am proudly relentless.”
David Yannetti: ‘Fearless litigator’
Yannetti has been on Read’s team from the start, bringing with him decades of experience in Massachusetts’s courts. He did not respond to an interview request.
He made a name for himself as an assistant district attorney and senior trial prosecutor in Middlesex County, where he secured convictions for the two men who killed 10-year-old Jeffrey Curley, a Cambridge boy who was abducted, sexually assaulted, and murdered in 1997.
It was during the Curley case that Yannetti earned a reputation as a “fearless litigator,” his firm would later say. He also won recognition for his closing argument in the Curley case, demonstrating a knack for impactful turns of phrase that he’d later bring to Read’s defense.
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Yannetti also prosecuted gang cases in Somerville, including a couple of racially charged cases involving members of the Notre Dame gang, a group of white teens who allegedly took on the “ND” initials to stand for “[N-words] Die,” The Boston Globe reported in 1992.
Since going into private practice, Yannetti notably won a new trial and secured an acquittal for Roland Douglas Phinney Jr., a Lowell man who spent 16 years in prison for a murder he said he didn’t commit.
Rounding out the defense team are Werksman Jackson & Quinn partner Elizabeth Little, who joined Jackson in representing Spacey on the Nantucket case, and Yannetti’s colleague Ian Henchy, who was admitted to the Massachusetts Bar in 2021 and previously gained some media exposure while representing a man accused of throwing hot coffee at an unmasked Dunkin’ customer last year.
What does it take to litigate a case like Karen Read’s?
There are a number of skills that come in handy for a defense attorney on a high-profile case such as Read’s, Elikann explained.
“The quality we look at is not only a very articulate lawyer, but somebody who really has the knowledge and background and experience, who really does know the law,” he said. “It’s a combination of being scholarly and being a great performer at the same time.”
The lawyers also need to present their case in a story-like fashion, he explained.
“Every case is a story that has a narrative, and some people are very skillful at kind of taking all these various pieces and parts of evidence and putting them together in a way that makes sense, that the average layperson could easily understand,” Elikann said. “You don’t want to get bogged down in kind of esoteric legalese, where people can barely even follow the story.”
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Speaking to his strategy, Jackson explained that he aims to dig into the details and make the facts accessible.
“My approach to a case like this is to question everything and expose all things,” he said. “My particular strength is to take a set of complex facts and distill them into a digestible and understandable truth.”
More on Karen Read:
Yet while the defense team has drawn acclaim from Read’s supporters, the lawyers have also met their fair share of controversy over the past several months.
Last week, a defense request for Judge Beverly Cannone’s recusal fizzled, with the judge dismissing claims that she had ties to people involved in the case as “untrue and unsubstantiated rumors spread on the internet.”
Prosecutors have also accused Read’s attorneys of attempting a “fishing expedition” and a “trial by media,” recently asking a judge to block the defense team from speaking about certain parts of the case outside the courtroom.
“In response to defense counsels’ call to action, witnesses have suffered unwarranted invasion of privacy as they have been receiving repeated and harassing phone calls, family members of witnesses have been contacted and harassed, and the victim’s family has suffered emotional harm due to the public dissemination of … [post-mortem] photographs,” prosecutors alleged in a June motion, which Cannone rejected Monday.
Yannetti pushed back on the motion in court last week, accusing prosecutors of stoking the “media circus” in the first place.
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“You have to be concerned, because while you can’t play to the media, you also want to be concerned that the other side is not doing it also,” Elikann said, reflecting on the proposed restrictions.
“The concern is that when there’s a highly publicized case, that the jury pool is being polluted,” he said. “You’re hoping that members of the jury remain impartial as the trial begins, and that their minds are not swayed either way by the publicity in a high-profile case.”
That’s why a lawyer’s “skillful handling” of jury selection is paramount, Elikann added.
The bottom line is abundantly clear for the defense team, the way Jackson sees it.
“Everyone should pay attention to this case, and be invested in the process,” he said. “Karen Read is an innocent woman wrongly accused. We will not rest until the truth is exposed and those responsible for John O’Keefe’s murder are brought to justice. The real culprits can take that to the bank.”
