DAY 19: Karen Read Retrial
Karen's own vehicle tattles on her.
ON THE STAND Today:
Shanon Burgess (Digital Forensic Expert for Aperture)
Christina Hanley (Forensic Scientist - Match Analyst )
Shanon Burgess (Digital Forensic Expert for Aperture)
CROSS-EXAMINATION (continued today):
Defense Attorney Alessi points out that the timeline on the power point pages has the date 1/30/22 instead of 1/29/22. Burgess looks and agrees that the date typo on the powerpoint display is off a day, but that it doesn’t change the actual data (minutes and seconds) of the vehicle’s power-on and off mode matching the Ring video footage of Karen with her SUV.
Defense questions the expert on his ‘time variance’ analysis. Regarding part of Burgess’ report, the defense suggests that he failed to apply the time variance on the SUV’s infotainment data regarding the reverse maneuver made.
Burgess does not agree, and asks if he can bring more context to the question, and the defense attorney stops him and says the prosecution can do that on redirect.
(Opinion: Defense arguing over mere seconds regarding the vehicle showing it reversed seems like a strange and wasteful line of questioning. It only reaffirms for the jury that she did reverse at the timeframe in question when John’s phone stops registering his steps).
Defense tries to claim that Burgess’ counterpart from the same company who also analyzed the techstream data, Judson Welcher (accident reconstructionist who will testify at some point), wrote in his report that the reverse time trigger was between 12:31:38 and 12:31:43, which are different in seconds from Burgess’ report.
Burgess clarifies that Judson Welcher’s report is reporting the unadjusted clock time of the Lexus.
Defense points out that Cellebrite’s Digital Forensic Expert, Ian Whiffin’s report shows that John’s iPhone was manually locked at 12:32:09 AM.
Defense says this timestamp of when the phone locked came before the vehicle reverse time, but Burgess reaffirms that the vehicle reverse time the defense keeps pointing out is the unadjusted clock time.
Earlier this month, Burgess had reviewed a report written by the defense team’s expert, Matthew DiSogra, and noticed that DiSogra made an error when calculating the clock variance times. Burgess turned in a supplemental report to acknowledge this.
Burgess uses the three-point turn Karen Read made on her way to the Fairview house as a data point to nail down time variance between the vehicle data and John’s phone.
Defense suggests that the supplemental report Burgess filed shows confirmation bias towards the prosecution. Burgess does not agree. His job is to help the jury to understand the technology and data. Multiple data points are used conjunctively to nail down exactness, and when he noticed a time variance issue, he adjusted that variance accordingly.
A trigger event recorded by the vehicle does not mean it was a ‘collision’, but in conjunction with other variables it can be inferred.
REDIRECT:
Prosecutor Brennan displays Shanon Burgess’ CV that was provided to all the attorneys for trial. It shows that Burgess’ is pursuing his BA degree, and does not claim to have already finished.
Burgess has not updated his Linkedin profile in years, and was unaware that his attended graduation date is still there despite that he stalled on completing it at that time.
Burgess works for Aperture who has about 80-100 employees and 15 offices. Burgess has no access to the company website to add his details, so he cannot confirm if the company’s HR team pulls his info from LinkedIn causing the BA degree discrepancy.
Burgess has testified in court many times and has never asserted that he already had his BA.
Prosecutor Brennan goes through Burgess’ certifications and hundreds of hours spent at various lectures, courses, seminars regarding his specific focus on digital forensics with vehicles and cell devices. A BA degree is not a necessary education path in this field of work. Brennan mentions Steve Jobs and Bill Gates as examples of this. Defense objects.
Burgess confirms that he was the one who noticed that Karen’s blackbox extraction was only partially pulled (unintentionally) prior to the first trial by other experts, and he played a pivotal part in accessing more of the data this time around.
Burgess explains why he believes the Defense Team’s expert, DiSogra (yet to testify), has made a faulty conclusion regarding the variance of seconds. He states that DiSogra’s method is not as precise. There is too much room for error.
Prosecutor Brennan has the expert reaffirm the multiple digital data points used to narrow down on the exactness of the SUV’s location and reverse motion time.
Karen Read’s SUV reversed somewhere between 12:32:04 AM and 12:32:12 AM
However, the CW experts narrow it down even more —
John’s last manual user interaction with his phone is at 12:32:09 AM, which means he wasn’t hit until after that second. This narrows the time down even more specifically to 12:32:10 AM and 12:32:12 AM
(The trigger event records when the motion is activated, not the full reverse event.)
John’s phone registers his last steps at 12:32:16 AM.
(Opinion: I truly don’t know how anyone can think she’s innocent at this point with this pinpoint data. Either the people framing Karen are the luckiest people in the world, or the drunk driver did — in fact — reverse into the man she “fucking hates”.)
RECROSS:
Defense mentions a different federal court case that Burgess testified in sometime prior to this trial. On his CV report provided for that particular trial it shows a BA degree with the date 2024 next to it.
Burgess points out that the CV was filed in 2023, and the date was a projected graduation date.
His current CV says “currently pursuing”. Defense asks why he didn’t write currently pursuing on his former CV, and Burgess reiterates that it was clearly a projected date of graduation. He says that work and life got in the way, so it’s been on the wayside for completion.
VIDEOS CLIPS PLAYED IN COURT:
(Thank you Jamz for providing the footage.)
Christina Hanley (Forensic Scientist)
Christina Hanley was responsible for analyzing and matching glass shards collected as evidence.
6 pieces of the glass shards collected by officers from the crime scene fit together mechanically with the broken cocktail glass found near the victim.
Several glass pieces were found on the bumper of the vehicle. Those did not match with the broken cocktail glass.
Court ended for the day while Hanley was still on direct-examination.