Oh Brother

A response to perhaps the worst "debunking" attempt in the history of legal commentary

Yesterday, YouTube lawyer and Free Karen Read grifter “Brother Counsel” recorded an hour long show purporting to “debunk” my recent post laying out all of the ways in which people like him have badly mischaracterized and overstated the testing and testimony of the ARCCA experts who testified in both of Karen Read’s criminal trials. I told myself before the show that I’d just let it slide, that it wasn’t worth my time to respond. But then I made the mistake of watching the show, and…good lord almighty.

Before you read what follows, I’d encourage you to judge for yourself. Read my post and then watch Brother Counsel’s response. I’m very confident that anyone with even two functioning brain cells left to rub together will immediately be able to tell which one of us knows what he’s talking about and which one is an embarrassing clown who shouldn’t be trusted to dispute a parking ticket violation, much less handle any actual case.

Before I get to some of the most embarrassing moments, a few meta-comments. First, as you know if you’ve read it, my post is quite long and includes a lot of initial build up and contextualization before I get into the actual detailed critique of ARCCA’s testing and testimony. What you’ll also notice, if you can stomach sitting through it, is that Brother Counsel’s “debunking” never gets past the introduction of my piece. Seriously. He goes on so many bizarre digressions that he never actually gets to any of the substance of the piece. Not a single detail.

As expected, he also spends much of the time trying to de-credential me by claiming that I don’t “sound like a lawyer” and even suggesting that I’m really Kevin Lenihan or Kate Peter. Hilariously, he opens the show by stating that the arguments I’m making are “not lawyer arguments” and asking (I’m not kidding) why I think I’m “much more smarter” than Hank Brennan.

As you may have noticed if you read my piece, it’s not a legal argument. The ARCCA guys are not lawyers and I’m not arguing case law or legal precedent. The point of the piece is twofold: 1) to show how badly Karen’s defenders are mischaracterizing what the ARCCA team actually said and did, and 2) to explain how poorly designed and executed ARCCA’s testing was and how little of significance can actually be inferred from it. These are all factual, logical, and scientific arguments, not legal ones. At no point in the piece do I invoke my credentials as a lawyer or ask the reader to rely on my legal experience or expertise. This, by contrast, is Brother Counsel’s entire schtick; he cloaks a bunch of really bad and misinformed analysis under the guise of “legal” expertise. His show really should be titled “Trust me Bro.”

But the other clear takeaway from Brother’s show is that he is just tragically, embarrassingly misinformed about the most basic facts and evidence in this case, a case which he has been relentlessly covering for years now. I would be absolutely mortified if I ever wrote anything or said anything publicly even half as wrong as dozens of the things he says in this single show. There are way too many examples to comprehensively catalog them all, but here are some of the worst.

Brother Counsel still, somehow, doesn’t understand even the basic factual context of the supposed 2:27 google search

In handwaving away the significance of any of the digital evidence in the case, Brother claimed that the “antis” want to believe that all the digital evidence is correct except the 2:27 search. He asserted, sarcastically, that this is the only criminal case in history where Cellebrite has ever been alleged to have made a mistake, implying that it’s absurd not to trust Cellebrite regarding the accuracy of the Jen McCabe google search. He even mocked Ian Whiffin while saying this, apparently unaware that Ian Whiffin is literally an employee of Cellebrite.

His rant betrayed that even today, after two trials and lots of testimony on this point, he doesn’t have even a rudimentary understanding of the specifics of that issue. He doesn’t understand that the 2:27 artifact didn’t come from the web history or any of the other databases that are normally examined and cited as evidence in cases (those databases actually show that the search was attempted at 6:24). He doesn’t understand that the 2:27 artifact came from a totally different database (browserstate.db), and that Cellebrite software didn’t even characterize the timestamps in that database prior to 2023. He doesn’t understand that there aren’t any examples, anywhere, of timestamp artifacts from this database being used as evidence in criminal cases. He doesn’t seem to understand that Cellebrite itself thoroughly investigated this issue and determined that the timestamps in browserstate.db do NOT correspond to the time that google searches are made or that Ian Whiffin demonstrated this live in front of the jury. Indeed, none of these things were even contested in the second trial. Brother was apparently too busy filming YouTube shows to actually watch that trial.

Brother Counsel hilariously explains why ARCCA’s original testing didn’t include anything related to the Commonwealth’s actual theory of the case

In response to the part of my piece explaining that ARCCA only tested two hypotheses as part of their work for the DOJ (the cocktail glass theory and the head/taillight theory) – neither of which were ever relevant to the Commonwealth’s theory of the case – Brother claimed that ARCCA actually did think of the Commonwealth’s theory but concluded “we don’t have to test this because its utterly impossible in physics.”

Putting aside that this is complete and utter fiction and never happened, how does anyone with any brain cells think this is an argument against the point I’m making? No actual scientist would ever approach a question in this way, and if they did, their completely conclusory opinion would not be given any weight by any serious person. Good grief.

Brother Counsel claims the iPhone data is irrelevant

In response to my comment that ARCCA (unlike Aperture) was never provided with or attempted to analyze John’s iPhone data, Brother actually said: “what does his iPhone data have to do with answering this question?” and then made some idiotic comment about how John climbing flights of stairs has nothing to do with whether he was hit by a car. This is the kind of stuff that should make any intelligent person’s head explode.

Brother Counsel offers perhaps the worst analogy of all time

Shortly after discounting the relevance of the iPhone data, Brother revealed — through an incredibly bad analogy — that he actually does understand the significance of the timeline derived from the iPhone data. He asked his audience to imagine that someone sped through a red light at night and that various evidence proved that this occurred at a specific time. The next day a body is found at that intersection, and the victim’s phone data reveals that he stopped moving at almost exactly the same time that the first person sped through the red light at the intersection. Brother acknowledged that this coincidence of timing would at first seem very suspicious. But here’s the twist. It turns out the victim died from a gunshot wound, so the coincidence of timing is irrelevant.

The only redeeming quality of this god-awful analogy is that it shows Brother at least understands, on some level, how incriminating the timeline is for Karen. But you have to be the world’s biggest idiot not to understand that adding the gunshot wound element to the story is just the equivalent of assuming away the entire debate here. If John was killed by a gunshot wound or a knife through the heart or any other means that cannot possibly occur from interaction with a car, we wouldn’t even have had a trial.

But he wasn’t. He died of a skull fracture caused by hitting the ground, something that can and does occur in car collisions all the time. And he stopped moving, forever, while Karen was engaged in a rapid reversal of her vehicle in the very spot where his body was later found. Sure, if there were some means to scientifically prove, beyond any doubt, that John’s body never came into contact with Karen’s vehicle, that would be dispositive. But the whole point of my piece is that ARCCA’s super limited testing came nowhere close to proving that (something Brother himself admits by the end of the show).

Brother Counsel is unaware of the basic timeline of the case, as set forth in the second trial

In my discussion of the many unknown variables involved in the collision, I noted that the most likely timing of the collision was shortly after the techstream data cutoff, meaning it could have occurred at a speed meaningfully slower than 24 mph. Brother was shocked by this. He said he’d never heard anyone say that before. But this is literally what Dr. Welcher testified to at trial and derives directly from the timeline. The last techstream data point is at 12:32:12. John’s last movement was at 12:32:16. Even factoring in potential Apple Health lag time (1-3 seconds), that means John’s last movement was likely 1-4 seconds after the techstream data cutoff. The fact that Brother is so unfamiliar with this key part of the evidentiary record that this thought never even occurred to him is just beyond embarrassing.

But then things somehow got even dumber. He claimed that Karen would definitely have passed the flagpole prior to the techstream cutoff, so if I’m right about the timing, it would mean that John was hit by the driveway and by Higgins’ Jeep. He then joked that John would have had to drag himself from the driveway back to the flagpole area. Needless to say, none of this is even remotely correct. The obvious flaw in this “analysis” is that we don’t know where the reversal started. Karen was already driving forward at 13 mph when the techstream data begins (at 12:32:02), so she had clearly covered some unknown distance before that. So there’s no reason whatsoever that the collision could not have occurred in the area of the flagpole.

Brother Counsel ticks through all of the dumbest FKR talking points

If you’re playing FKR BINGO, Brother (quite impressively) managed to work in the phrases “butt dials,” “military base” and “dog rehoming” all in the same sentence less than five minutes into the show. In addition, he said the following:

• He claimed that Jen McCabe deleted google searches and phone calls, a contention that was refuted at trial by undisputed expert testimony (the calls were auto-deleted due to volume and no google searches were deleted; it’s not even possible for users to delete artifacts from browserstate.db)

• He completely misrepresented Officer Barros’s testimony (like everyone in FKR land, he pretends that Barros’ disastrous cross-examination never occurred).

• He treated it as a settled fact that John was attacked by a dog (“I’m very convinced a dog was involved”), despite the fact that both the state ME (the only person to ever examine John’s body) and the Federal ME both disagree.

• He claimed the glass pieces found on the SUV were planted by Proctor (a complete mischaracterization of trial testimony)

• He worked in at least five references to the blue paint demonstration conducted by Aperture, misrepresenting what it was each time.

Brother Counsel is profoundly disingenuous

I confess that I’ve only ever watched two of Brother Counsel’s complete shows (the two he dedicated to “debunking” my articles), but I’ve seen a bunch of clips and have read what he posts on Twitter. He is not a particularly bright guy, he’s incredibly uninformed and incurious, and his analytical abilities are quite limited, but he is still much smarter than his target audience. On some level, he knows that the evidence against Karen Read is very compelling. He knows that the timeline derived from the digital data is quite damning and impossible to meaningfully dispute. He knows that it’s impossible to construct an alternative theory of what happened to John that can be reconciled with all of the objective, undisputed evidence in this case. So he just avoids any discussion of these inconvenient facts with his audience.

His copout, which he repeats all the time (including in this episode), is to say he doesn’t know what happened to John because the investigation was so inadequate. I’m not going to rehash why the various critiques of the investigation are largely disingenuous and massively overstated, but even if you genuinely believe that the investigation was terrible, it doesn’t intellectually absolve you from understanding and analyzing all of the evidence that does exist. There is a LOT of evidence in this case, way more than you typically have in hit-and-run cases, and the most important parts of that evidence are undisputed and incapable of fabrication. There’s no excuse for ignoring or handwaving all of that evidence away.

Moreover, as a basic logical mater, even the most inadequate of investigations doesn’t absolve Karen. The only way she’s innocent is if a bunch of cops conspired to plant all of the physical evidence against her. Incompetence in this case is not nearly enough.

Toward the end of his show, Brother concedes that ARCCA did not actually prove or testify that John was not hit by a car, that all they did was testify that their handful of tests produced results “inconsistent” with the physical evidence in this case. He claims that this “is just how experts talk,” that they “don’t speak in absolutes.” This is also disingenuous. While it’s certainly true that experts generally don’t speak in absolutes, that they frame their conclusions in terms of “reasonable scientific certainty,” the actual testimony of the ARCCA experts was considerably more watered down than that. All they did (and could) conclude from their work in this case was that the specific results of the handful of tests they ran (out of a massive universe of tests that could have been run) were not consistent (sometimes in relatively minor ways) with the physical evidence in this case. That is not even in the same ballpark as concluding that no collision occurred or that no possible collision scenario is consistent with the laws of physics.

And that matters a lot. When literally all of the digital, physical, and testimonial evidence strongly points to the occurrence of a collision — and no other coherent theory of the case can be reconciled with that evidence — it makes absolutely no logical or scientific sense to over-interpret the results of a handful of very questionably designed and ambiguous tests commissioned and directed by a legal team whose sole job was to get their client acquitted. Actual lawyers know this, and ethical lawyers don’t spend all of their time on YouTube trying to snow over gullible audiences.