Latest news with #StoughtonPolice
Yahoo
5 days ago
- Yahoo
Closed-door hearing for officer involved in Sandra Birchmore case begins Thursday
The state's police oversight agency will make its case at a closed-door hearing beginning Thursday for why one of the former Stoughton Police officers involved in the Sandra Birchmore case should never again work in law enforcement in Massachusetts. Robert Devine, the former Stoughton deputy police chief, is among a trio of former Stoughton officers, along with brothers Matthew and William Farwell, accused of having inappropriate sexual relationships with Birchmore after she joined their police youth program as a teenager. Devine is fighting efforts from the Massachusetts Peace Officer Standards and Training Commission, or POST, to revoke his certification for police work, a requirement for all officers employed in the commonwealth. Beginning Thursday, his case will play out in secret at the commission office in Boston after a retired judge presiding over the hearing ruled last week that protective orders covering sensitive evidence necessitated closing proceedings to the public and press. Some open government advocates criticized the decision for restricting access to a hearing of significant public interest. The commission was created in 2020, after the killing of George Floyd by a Minnesota police officer, 'to increase transparency and accountability' in law enforcement, said Justin Silverman, executive director of the New England First Amendment Coalition.'You've got this horrible case that's going to be heard behind closed doors,' he said. 'That strikes me as out of step with why the commission was created.' The Birchmore case took a sharp turn last year when federal authorities charged Mathew Farwell with killing Birchmore in February 2021 and staging her death as a suicide. He had hoped to prevent her from revealing their relationship, which authorities said began when she was underage. A state medical examiner had previously ruled that Birchmore killed herself, a determination federal officials said missed key signs of a cover-up. According to prosecutors, Birchmore had told Farwell she was pregnant with his child before her death at age 23. Farwell denied to investigators that he was the father. Neither his brother William nor Devine faces criminal charges connected to the case, though all three are named in a wrongful death lawsuit brought by Birchmore's aunt. Read more: Sandra Birchmore timeline: from Stoughton Explorer to arrest of Matthew Farwell Devine's hearing centers on claims that he abused his position of authority, lied to internal investigators and behaved in a manner unbecoming of a police officer. Birchmore met the Farwell brothers and Devine, who supervised them, after joining the Stoughton Police Explorers Program as a 12-year-old in 2010. She remained in the program until graduating high school. According to federal prosecutors, Matthew Farwell began sexually exploiting Birchmore in 2013, when he was 27 and she was 15, under the age of consent in Massachusetts. Their sexual encounters continued regularly as she grew older and sometimes occurred while he was on duty, investigators said. According to charging documents, as Farwell began to lose control of Birchmore in late 2020, he agreed to help her get pregnant in return for keeping their relationship while she was underage a secret. On Feb. 1, 2021, prosecutors say, Farwell strangled Birchmore at her apartment in Canton and staged her death as a suicide. The Stoughton Police Department launched an internal investigation after Birchmore's death into her interactions with the Farwell brothers and Devine. When interviewed by investigators, Devine claimed that he had never communicated online with Birchmore and that the pair had only limited interactions, according to a notice from the POST Commission initiating the decertification proceedings. But records from Facebook Messenger showed Devine and Birchmore exchanged messages 'on multiple occasions,' he using the alias 'Marty Riggs,' from November 2020 until her death in February 2021, the commission said. Their messages also indicated that Devine 'arranged to have a sexual encounter' with Birchmore during one shift he was working in December 2021, according to the commission. The internal investigation by the Stoughton Police found Devine had been untruthful, incompetent and 'failed to demonstrate attention and devotion to his duty.' In a ruling Friday, Judge Kenneth J. Fishman, who is presiding over the hearing, said protective orders covering evidence related to the case meant the proceedings must be kept confidential. There are four protective orders dealing with the Birchmore case: one approved by a federal judge dealing with Matthew Farwell's criminal case, one from Attorney General Andrea Campbell's office related to the lawsuit brought by Birchmore's family, and two from Fishman regarding Devine's case with the POST Commission. The U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Massachusetts requested the protective order in the Farwell case to prevent the release of information it believed could expose Birchmore or witnesses 'to significant safety and/or privacy risks.' Among the information covered under the protective order, the government said in a September court filing, were crime scene and autopsy photographs of Birchmore's body, data from her phone and laptop 'from which it would be impractical or impossible to redact all identifying information,' Birchmore's medical records and police reports identifying witnesses by name. Fishman's order closing Devine's hearing to the public said protective orders were in place to protect confidential evidence and 'the identity of an individual.' Many of the materials and information would be discussed throughout the hearing, Fishman wrote. Understanding that at least some portion of the hearing must be closed, the judge said he considered 'the feasibility of structuring the presentation of evidence to enable an efficient proceeding between the closed and, if any, open portions of the hearing.' Attorneys for the commission and Devine advised Fishman that the entire session would be interspersed with discussions of confidential information. 'It's unlikely that any testimony regarding the substance of the allegations would cover topics outside of the protected evidence,' commission lawyers said. Fishman concluded that there was 'no reasonable method for opening any portions of this hearing to the public without a substantial risk of disclosing confidential evidence,' he wrote. Commission hearings are 'presumptively public,' but can be closed 'if the presiding officer determines that full or limited closure is necessary to protect privacy interests and will not be contrary to the public interest,' a commission spokesperson said in a statement to MassLive. The commission pointed to five other cases where hearings had been closed, including cases when it was needed to protect the identity of a victim of sexual or violent crimes, the spokesperson said. Both Farwell brothers and Devine left the department in 2022. The brothers each reached agreements with the commission last year to be stripped of their certifications, a move that carries a lifetime ban from police work in Massachusetts. Like other officers whose certifications have been revoked, they were added to a national registry of decertified police officers designed to prevent them from finding police work in other states. Mass. police watchdog decertifies officers from Boston, Springfield and 3 other towns Mass. police watchdog revokes 5 officers' certifications: 'Not fit for duty' Former Boston Police officer who secretly filmed nude child banned from police work Read the original article on MassLive.
Yahoo
18-05-2025
- Yahoo
Karen Read judge blocks Sandra Birchmore mentions; expert says cases should be wake-up call for police
A Massachusetts judge has agreed to bar references to an unrelated, botched murder investigation in Karen Read's second trial on murder and other charges in the 2022 death of her Boston police officer boyfriend, John O'Keefe. Police in Canton, a suburb about 20 miles south of Boston, inaccurately determined the Feb. 4, 2021 death of Sandra Birchmore, 24, was a suicide before federal investigators said she had been strangled and charged a Stoughton officer with her murder. The FBI arrested former Stoughton Police Officer Matthew Farwell, 38, in August in Birchmore's murder. Karen Read Defense Floats Theory That 'Jealous' Brian Higgins Fought John O'keefe Before Death He is accused of grooming her since she was a teenager, maintaining a sexual relationship for years and then killing her when she told him she'd become pregnant and staging the murder to look like a suicide. Canton Police were also the first to respond after O'Keefe was reported unresponsive outside another Boston Police officer's house Jan. 29, 2022, during a blizzard. Read On The Fox News App Local police collected bloody snow evidence in red Solo cups and placed them in a Stop and Shop grocery bag. A Canton lieutenant used a leaf blower to move snow from where O'Keefe's body had been found. Witnesses were interviewed informally, off camera and not at the police station. Karen Read Trial Reveals Flirty Text Messages With Atf Agent Behind Boyfriend's Back O'Keefe was found dead on Brian Albert's front lawn. Albert's brother is a Canton Police detective. State police took over the investigation later that day. But their involvement wasn't without controversy. The lead detective was fired earlier this year after an internal investigation into unprofessional text messages revealed in court during Read's first trial, which ended in a mistrial. Read the motion: State Trooper Points To Possible Weapon In John O'keefe Death – And It's Not Karen Read's Car "Gov. [Maura] Healey should have ordered the revamping of police training in the state after the debacle in Karen Read 1.0," said Joseph Giacalone, a retired NYPD sergeant and criminal justice professor at Penn State Lehigh Valley. "Everything from response to the scene by patrol officers to securing the scene to identifying evidence, the proper collection of evidence, the proper containers for that evidence and so on." The two cases prompted town residents to demand an audit into their own police department, and the town board hired a firm called 5 Stones Intelligence, or 5Si. Karen Read's Google Timeline Derailed Again As 2Nd Expert Disputes Defense Claims The firm released its findings in a 206-page report April 1, the same day jury selection began in Read's retrial. It found no evidence that Canton Police had conspired to frame Read, but the auditors recommended that all death cases be reviewed by supervisors in the future. In the report, 5Si recommended that Canton detectives undergo "advanced training" on crime scene investigations and that all patrol vehicles be equipped with crime scene kits and evidence collection bags. They called for an increase in the police department's budget. GET REAL-TIME UPDATES DIRECTLY ON THE True Crime Hub There was also a federal investigation into the handling of O'Keefe's death. Read remains the only person charged. She faces charges of second-degree murder, drunken driving manslaughter and fleeing a deadly accident for allegedly striking O'Keefe with her Lexus SUV during an argument and leaving him for dead around 12:30 a.m. She and two friends returned at 6 a.m. and found O'Keefe on the ground, covered in snow that had intensified throughout the day. An autopsy found his cause of death was trauma to the head and hypothermia. The manner was undetermined. Follow The Fox True Crime Team On X Read has denied striking O'Keefe at all, pleaded not guilty and suggested she is being framed by local police and their allies. She was first tried on the charges last year, but jurors deadlocked, and Judge Beverly Cannone declared a mistrial. So far in the retrial, at least one evidence bag appears to have been mislabeled, and another had more pieces of broken taillight than expected. Massachusetts State Police Sgt. Yuri Bukhenik was also grilled about a lack of photographs for some evidence and a delay of hundreds of days for some reports in the investigation. "If nothing else, they should be taught documentation, documentation and documentation," Giacalone told Fox News Digital. "These aren't small mistakes. These are errors that will cost you cases, will cause lawsuits in the state of Massachusetts and it just makes everybody in the criminal justice system look bad." "If Massachusetts has this problem, what about other states?" Giacalone said. "Now's the time to nip them in the bud before we find out another Karen Reed trial disaster." Special prosecutor Hank Brennan, a high-profile defense attorney whose clients have included mobster Whitey Bulger, was brought in to lead the second trial. He asked Cannone last week to block the defense from bringing up the Birchmore case as Read's lawyers look to paint the investigation as unreliable and corrupt. She agreed, unless the "door is opened" by prosecutors. "They're not gonna open that door," said Linda Kenney Baden, a high-profile defense attorney who squared off against Read lawyer Alan Jackson, a prosecutor during the first trial of record producer Phil Spector in 2007. Like Read's, it ended in a mistrial. WATCH: Zoomed-in clip appears to show Karen Read backing into parked SUV Still, she said, she believes there is plenty of room for jurors to find reasonable doubt. "They gotta prove she hit him," she said. "It's really as simple as that. It's a drunk-driving hit-and-run." Read's SUV has a broken taillight, and police witnesses described finding matching pieces on Albert's front lawn. But the defense also played surveillance video from O'Keefe's garage that appears to show her backing her SUV into his parked vehicle shortly before she found his remains along with two other women, Kerry Roberts and Jennifer McCabe. Still, the veteran trial attorney praised Brennan's handling of the case and how he's left out key witnesses who may have tanked the prosecution in the first trial and gave the defense less room to maneuver. "The way Brennan has tried this case is that he's not letting any of the bad stuff in, so whenever Alan Jackson goes to the stuff that really hurts them, he doesn't have a place to go there," she said. For one, he left former Massachusetts State Tpr. Michael Proctor off the prosecution's witness list. Proctor sent a series of rude, lewd and unprofessional text messages about Read and the investigation, which led to his firing. He is still on the defense's witness list and could be called to the stand article source: Karen Read judge blocks Sandra Birchmore mentions; expert says cases should be wake-up call for police
