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Disgraced former Massachusetts State Police Trooper Michael Proctor is no longer fighting to get his job back, but his investigative work is still attracting the attention of defense attorneys.
Proctor was fired in March because of his handling of the Karen Read case. He served as the lead investigator into the death of her boyfriend, Boston Police Officer John O’Keefe.
Read was ultimately acquitted of the most serious charges against her, including murder, at the end of her second trial this year.
The work of former Massachusetts State Police Trooper Michael Proctor, who was fired over his handling of the Karen Read investigation, is being scrutinized by defense attorneys in other cases.
Recent court documents show the Norfolk County District Attorney’s Office has examined nearly 20 cases involving him.
“I’m not surprised that the number is high — before we’re done, it might even go higher,” said NBC10 Boston legal analyst Michael Coyne.
Prosecutors were ordered to review a federal investigation of the Read case and turn over any evidence beneficial to other defendants whose cases involved the former state trooper.
The cases were identified as part of a document involving Brian Walshe, charged with the murder of his wife, Ana Walshe. Proctor investigated that case, as well.
Michael Proctor has moved to dismiss his appeal to get his Massachusetts State Police job back — he lost it in the wake of the Karen Read case, for which he led the investigation. In a separate case, 13 years of deleted cellphone data from his phone was located in the cloud.
“Any time that you can use some of these mistakes that he’s made to help put doubt in the minds of a juror, well, that is precisely what they’re supposed to do,” Coyne said.
It’s unclear what, if any, information was given to the defendants, with a lot of the details coming from Proctor’s cellphone.
“Remember, Tom Brady destroyed his cellphone during Deflategate,” Coyne said. “Most people would not want their phones examined. He turned it over, in part, thinking that he had deleted some of this information, but as we’re learning, things are never deleted forever.”
Interest in Proctor’s phone activity is not new — during the state’s first trial against Read last year, which ended in a mistrial, he acknowledged in his testimony that he sent offensive texts about the defendant to his friends, family members and fellow state police troopers during the investigation. He did not testify at the retrial.
Coyne compared the review of Proctor’s investigative work to the case of Annie Dookan, the state criminologist who admitted to tampering with evidence, prompting a review of thousands criminal cases.
“You’re not going to see anything of that magnitude,” Coyne said. “This is small county, it’s Norfolk County, but again, it does tell you, when the evidence is tainted, the defense attorneys are going to dig deep.”
The judge overseeing this process has ordered for the federal evidence pulled from the investigation to be saved instead of being destroyed.
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John Moroney, Robert Goulston and Mike Pescaro
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