Karen Read and her defense team, and the masses of public and media following the complex case surrounding the alleged murder of Boston Police officer John O’Keefe, descended on Norfolk Superior Court this morning where the Mansfield woman argued to throw out the case all together.

The morning hearing, which was until recently scheduled as the beginning off the trial, began with defense attorney Alan Jackson’s argument for a dismissal of the indictment. Jackson pointed toward what he described as close relationships between the investigating police and Brian Albert, the then-owner of 34 Fairview Road in Canton where O’Keefe’s body was found in the snow in late January 2023.

Read is charged with the murder of O’Keefe, her boyfriend of two years. Prosecutors say that she struck him with the rear of her Lexus SUV outside the Albert home following a night out drinking on the town.

But Jackson said that from the beginning, the investigation was compromised, a theory he says is bolstered by federal grand jury testimony from some of the investigating officers who he said admitted that they had lied about their relationship to principal state witnesses in the case. The federal reports as well as the defense filings that reference Jackson’s assertions remain sealed.

Jackson said that Massachusetts State Police Trooper Michael Proctor, the principal investigator in the case, has an extensive history with the Alberts and had even texted Julie Albert to have her babysit his child at one point. Even more compromising, he said, was that Julie Albert had texted Proctor to offer a “thank you gift” for his handling of the investigation, an offer that Proctor not only didn’t decline and report to the DA but asked to for another gift for his wife, Elizabeth.

Jackson also argued that prosecutors had failed to bring up what he called the most powerful piece of exculpatory evidence: that Jennifer McCabe, Albert’s sister-in-law, made a Google search for “ho[w] long to die in cold” before O’Keefe’s body was found.

“Any one of these examples, the gift giving, the babysitting, the Google extraction… would be enough to dismiss the indictments, but the cumulative effect is too much for the court to ignore,” Jackson said. “It just didn’t give Karen Read a fair shot. It just didn’t.”

Prosecutor Adam Lally said in response to the defense’s argument, “Essentially it’s a three-card monty trick … look at this relationship, look at that relationship. A distortion of the facts in a way that lives in the social media realm.”

He said it’s a distraction from the point of the matter as the commonwealth sees it: “(Everything) indicates that the defendant, Karen Read, killed John O’Keefe.”

Next up was defense attorney David Yannetti, who has represented Read from the beginning, with an impassioned argument that Norfolk District Attorney Michael Morrissey, in releasing a statement to the public on the matter, behaved so recklessly and with unprofessional bias that not only should he be sanctioned but that his office should be disqualified from prosecuting the case.

He said that Morrissey’s comments, which he said impugned the defense’s third-party culpability theory and unfairly vouched for state witnesses in a way that pretty much find’s Read’s guilt a fact, was in response to a change in the structure of a case pretrial. Usually, Yannetti argued, prosecutors are “used to controlling the narrative,” while “the defense remains quiet and the media usually loses interest until the trial.”

“In this case, their control of the narrative didn’t last long,” Yannetti said, adding that the defense had taken an unusually investigative and outspoken posture in defense of Read because they believed the evidence was so strong in her defense.

“In his own words, DA Morrissey said he has an interest in this case that goes beyond the interests of justice,” Yannetti said. He added that the video statement, reported at length in regional media, as demonstrated by a very thick packet of news story printouts Yannetti held up, was — he leaned closer to the microphone — “an outrage.”

The dramatic bit drew some snickers from the right-side of the court’s gallery, which was mostly filled with those who support the prosecution’s version of events and show off their partisanship on the matter with yellow “Justice for JJ” pins. O’Keefe’s supporters provide a counterbalance to the other side’s “Free Karen Read” t-shirts and copious signs.

Lally said that Morrissey’s statement was “in conformity with the rules of professional conduct.” The statement was made, he said, as a reaction to “relentless” badgering of state witnesses, which included people driving by people’s houses and calling them ‘murderers.’

This is a developing story.