My job is to follow legal news in the news. Apparently, I’m not very good at my job. A month ago, a non-journalist friend messaged me asking what I thought about the Karen Reed murder trial. I replied, “Who’s Karen Reed?” I had no idea what they were talking about. A few weeks later, I got multiple messages from other friends and realized who Karen Reed was. You can’t help but know who Karen Reed is. This feels like a rare trial that has already transcended the realm of popular true crime documentaries and burst into the mainstream.
Speculation is rife as the Boston jury continues its days of deliberations. On Friday, the jury said it was struggling to reach a verdict. The judge told the jury to keep trying. And we’ll just have to wait.
Karen Reed is a 44-year-old finance professor from Massachusetts who is accused of intentionally backing her Boston Police Department boyfriend, John O’Keefe, into a Lexus SUV during a snowstorm, leaving him unconscious and dead outside a house party. Her vehicle was damaged, and Reed allegedly made numerous statements at the crime scene that strengthened her accusation, including, “I hit him. I hit him. Oh my God. I hit him.”
Case closed, right? The prosecution’s case seemed pretty simple: a typical lovers’ quarrel turned deadly. Or maybe a common scenario where a drunk driver didn’t realize they’d hit someone. So, at first, I didn’t understand why this case had attracted so much attention. The prosecution had evidence: damage to the back of Reid’s car, that she had been driving while intoxicated, a “bad” relationship between her and the victim, an expletive-filled voicemail left by Reid on the victim’s cell phone, and the defendant’s supposed voluntary admission that he had hit the victim.
But that was before I reviewed the evidence, watched the closing arguments, and immersed myself in the defense’s theory. If I were on the jury now, I would vote not guilty.
Let me be clear here: I’m not convinced that Reed is innocent. Rather, I believe there is a reasonable doubt of her guilt, which means she is innocent. Reed’s defense team pulled off a rare miracle in criminal defense: they constructed an alternative theory of police cover-up and actually presented some evidence to support it.
The defense does not have to present an alternative theory of the case. The defense is under no obligation to prove that someone else committed the crime. There is no burden on the defense. They can simply rest and argue that the prosecution has not met its burden of proving beyond a reasonable doubt. But ideally, the defense would want an alternative theory of the case so that the jury has something to believe. The jury wants to feel like they have solved the mystery. But presenting an alternative theory is much harder than simply pointing out flaws in the prosecution or arguing that “someone else did it” (the “SODDI” defense). What Reed’s defense did is even harder. Her lawyers are arguing that the police did it. The “someone else” in this case is law enforcement, trying to incriminate their client.
Any criminal lawyer will tell you frankly that their clients often want this type of defense (“The cops planted drugs on me!”), but in most cases there is no hard evidence that the police planted or concealed evidence, and the defense wisely rejects this strategy.
But “framing” works. OJ Simpson’s defense team tried this tactic. It was a bold move. But they got away with it, despite overwhelming evidence pointing to Simpson’s guilt.
Reed’s defense team did an equally impressive job exposing major inconsistencies and sloppy police investigations. They hired top expert witnesses and analyzed data. They used a health app on the victim, O’Keefe’s phone to suggest he went downstairs to the basement during a house party. The prosecution and party organizers argued that he never went into the basement, but the defense did not.
Reed’s defense team presented the theory that Reed had dropped O’Keefe off at a party, after which O’Keefe got into a fight with someone and was attacked by the family dog. Reed’s defense team brought in an expert who argued that O’Keefe’s wounds were consistent with bites from a dog that was the same size as those in the family home and had a history of biting people.
And even if the police weren’t covering up, they likely engaged in some suspicious behavior. The lead investigator was texting others with inappropriate comments about Reid. Three prosecution witnesses testified that their phone calls to each other during key times, including the night of the murders, were inadvertent “butt dials.” But “butt dialing” itself is an anachronism; phones no longer have buttons that allow you to sit down and make a call, making it an implausible reason for suspicious calls.
Admittedly, there are still some flaws in this defense theory, most notably why the police would have staged such an elaborate cover-up that required multiple co-conspirators, only to then leave the victim’s body outside the house where the crime actually took place. Police officers know better than anyone that if you’re going to “dump” a body somewhere, the worst place to do it is in your own backyard.
I myself work as a criminal lawyer, and I am often skeptical of defense theories. It is fair to say that in many cases, the prosecution gets the right people for the defendants. But I also know that police can be lazy and sloppy, and at worst, they will bend the truth to protect themselves and each other. In this case, I think the evidence suggests at least a degree of police selfishness and dishonesty.
Much of this cover-up required a lot of things to go right, not just on the night of O’Keefe’s murder, but in the days that followed. The defense argues that the best thing the group of friends could come up with in the aftermath of a fight with a severely injured but still-living victim was to dump the man on the lawn. Some people make stupid decisions when they’re drunk and panicked, but this was a terrible plan. The prosecution made this point in their closing arguments, presenting a barrage of evidence against the defendants, much of it coming from their own mouths.
Still, I won’t vote “not guilty.” But I will vote “not guilty.”
This article originally appeared on MSNBC.com.
