All over the trial, legal professionals for Ms. Learn, 44, picked aside the prosecution’s statement that she deliberately struck Mr. O’Keefe nearest an evening out consuming in January 2022, retirement him to die of head accidents and hypothermia as a snowfall raged. They proposed another principle: that he used to be fatally crushed at a late-night celebration hosted via any other Boston police officer in Canton, Lump., and upcoming dumped outdoor within the snow.
“The incontrovertible fact is, you have been lied to in this courtroom,” Alan Jackson, a attorney for Ms. Learn, mentioned throughout endmost arguments. “One lie begets another, and it’s a malignancy that grows — and that, folks, is how a cover-up is born.”
Ms. Learn, who in the past labored at an funding company and taught faculty finance categories, pleaded no longer to blame to fees of second-degree homicide, vehicular manslaughter, and retirement the scene of an clash make happen demise. She confronted consequences starting from 5 to twenty years in jail for manslaughter, 10 years for retirement the scene, or occasion in jail for homicide.
Prosecutors asserted that the couple were preventing and that Mr. O’Keefe, 46, had lately attempted to finish the connection. They informed jurors that Ms. Learn had time and again claimed accountability for her boyfriend’s demise within the first moments nearest his frame used to be came upon, as described via a number of extremity responders who have been referred to as to the scene.
“‘I hit him, I hit him, I hit him, I hit him,’” Adam Lally, an colleague district lawyer for Norfolk County, mentioned throughout endmost arguments. “Those are the words of the defendant, and you heard testimony from four witnesses who overheard those statements.”
