Editor’s note: This article was updated at 5:25 p.m. on June 9, 2026 to add a comment from the Norfolk District Attorney’s Office.
The leader of Massachusetts’ public defender agency said Tuesday that the bigoted text messages exchanged by two former investigators revealed in a new lawsuit from Karen Read raised “immediate concerns about the fairness of cases in which they were involved.”
The Committee for Public Counsel Services sent letters Tuesday to both the Massachusetts State Police and the Norfolk County District Attorney’s office, asking the agencies to provide lists of all open and closed cases involving the two investigators, former State Police Trooper Michael Proctor and former Canton Police Sgt. Sean Goode. The agency also issued an advisory guiding defense lawyers on how to handle cases involving the two men…