BOSTON — Norfolk District Attorney Michael Morrissey remains on the hot seat as Karen Read’s defense team argues he has used his personal cellphone and email to communicate with the court and witnesses in the case.

Defense attorney David Yannetti has said he learned that Morrissey’s text messages are “somehow remarkably set to auto-delete after 30 days,” sparking concern about what the DA may be hiding.

“That obviously raises some questions for us, maybe the subject of a future motion, but more immediately, the concern is that every day that passes we’re losing text messages from 30 days prior,” Yannetti said at the end of a hearing at Norfolk Superior Court last week.

Read’s defense team filed a motion in early November to look into Morrissey’s personal email and cellphone for any reference to their client’s case, saying they have evidence he’s made improper communications.

Yannetti expanded on the request last Tuesday, detailing how they’d like to search Morrissey’s personal iCloud email for references of “Read” and “Reed,” names of relevant witnesses, all judges who have sat on the case and clerk’s office employees at Stoughton District Court and Norfolk Superior Court.

“We don’t know if he did that for the purpose of avoiding a FOIA request or if he just misspelled my client’s name,” Yannetti said of Morrissey spelling his client’s last name “Reed.”

“We have reason not to trust Mr. Morrissey in the light of his actions using this personal email account to make an ex parte communication,” Yannetti added, “and we ask that a more thorough search be done for these types of communications.”

The defense has taken exception to how Morrissey communicated ex parte with personnel and judges at Stoughton District Court, according to “documentary evidence.”

Morrissey’s personal cellphone and email use sprung into the spotlight amid the witness intimidation case involving Aidan “Turtleboy” Kearney.

The Holden-based journalist has extensively covered the Read case on his blogs and social media accounts from an intensely pro-Read perspective, and he has been charged with intimidating witnesses in Read’s case for her benefit.

Read’s defense team requested access to Morrissey’s personal cellphone and email after Kearney’s attorney Mark Bederow filed a similar motion in October.

Bederow claimed Morrissey used his personal email address to chastise Stoughton District Court for “leaking” information about a public proceeding against Kearney to the defendant and that his communications included screenshots of text messages from a pro-prosecution witness in Read’s case, as well as other information indicating more than one witness was in communication with the DA’s office.

Public officials’ use of private emails for government business is considered a violation of state law.

In a blog post on Nov. 19, Kearney highlighted how his defense team filed another motion in Norfolk Superior Court asking specifically for “access to Morrissey’s private email account that he used to communicate with judges ex parte about Turtleboy’s activism on September 29, 2023.”

“It’s clear from the postings that Stoughton Court is directly involved in this dissemination of information affecting our murder prosecution,” Morrissey wrote in an email that day to Stacey Fortes, chief justice of the Massachusetts District Court. Kearney included a screenshot of the communication in his post.

“From the comments from one of the witnesses, you can see that they have clearly lost all confidence in the Courts of the Commonwealth,” Morrissey continued. “I have to agree that the actions erode the trust and integrity between the courts and the public and the relationship with the District Attorney’s Office.”

On Friday, Kearney posted on his X account that the court “withheld ‘embarrassing’ emails. (Morrissey) used this account regularly to email dozens of judges about court business. He even mocked the trial courts and their efficiency in one email.”

Also Friday, Norfolk Superior Court Judge Beverly Cannone, overseeing the Read murder case, denied the prosecution’s request for her parents’ phone records, which they said could have bolstered their argument that the defendant knew she struck and left John O’Keefe to die in a snowstorm.

Read, 44, of Mansfield, is charged with second-degree murder, motor vehicle manslaughter while operating under the influence, and leaving the scene of an accident causing death in the killing of her boyfriend of roughly two years, Boston Police Officer John O’Keefe, in the early morning of Jan. 29, 2022.

Prosecutors say that she struck O’Keefe with her SUV after yet another drunken bout of fighting in the troubled relationship, and left him to freeze and die on the front yard of a Canton home where the pair was supposed to continue a night out after the bars closed.

The defense counters that O’Keefe made it inside that home and was killed by others inside, including possibly then-homeowner Brian Albert, who was a fellow Boston Police officer. It alleges the well-connected police family then worked with local and state police investigators to cover up the crime and frame Read.

Read’s first trial ended with a hung jury in July. The defense and prosecution have requested the retrial, scheduled for late January, be pushed back to April.

Morrissey has received backlash after he blasted internet trolls in an August 2023 video for spreading “baseless” theories in the case.

“The harassment of witnesses in the murder prosecution of Karen Read is absolutely baseless,” the DA said in the video, which he described as “the first statement of its kind” in his tenure. “It should be an outrage to any decent person — and it needs to stop. Innuendo is not evidence. False narratives are not evidence.”

“However, what evidence does show is that John O’Keefe never entered the home at 34 Fairview Road in Canton on the night he died,” he added. “Location data from his phone — recovered from the lawn beneath his body when he was transported to the hospital — shows that his phone did not enter that home.”

Morrissey is up for reelection in 2026 and faces two candidates who have already vowed to run for the position.

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