Prosecutors say Green misinterpreted the data and called their own experts at trial who said they were certain those searches weren't made until some four hours later, corroborating McCabe's prior testimony.
It's "completely inexplicable how the Commonwealth can now challenge the methodology of Richard Green, whose methodology is the same as, and then more comprehensive than, the proffered experts offered by the Commonwealth," Read's lawyers wrote Tuesday.
Read's lawyers said prosecutors are inching "closer to ... the danger zone of legal tyranny" by trying to keep Green from offering his opinions a second time.
Read, 44, has pleaded not guilty to charges of second-degree murder, manslaughter while operating under the influence, and leaving the scene of personal injury resulting in death.
Prosecutors allege that she drunkenly backed her SUV into O'Keefe, her boyfriend, after dropping him off early on Jan. 29, 2022, outside a Canton home following a night of bar-hopping.
Her lawyers say she was framed and that O'Keefe entered the house, owned at the time by a fellow Boston police officer, where he was fatally beaten in the basement before his body was planted on the front lawn.
Read's first trial ended in a hung jury in July, and her retrial is scheduled for April. She remains free on bail.
McCabe, one of the guests at the Canton home that night, testified at the first trial that she entered the terms "how long ti die in ckld" and "Hos long to die in cold" shortly after 6:20 a.m. at Read's request, after the women had returned to the residence and Read found O'Keefe lying unconscious in the snow.
Green, however, testified that he found a search for "hos [sic] long to die in cold" on McCabe's phone at 2:27 a.m. The search was first stored in a temporary "wall file" on the device, he said.
Records indicated the search was "in a deleted state," he said. He said the tab's full internet history could not be recovered.
On cross-examination, Green told prosecutor Adam Lally that in addition to the hypothermia search, he detected searches for a "raining men" song and for a youth sports program marked around the same time.
McCabe had testified that she was making searches related to youth sports around 2:30 a.m., before she went to bed.
In their motion, prosecutors said that government experts from the digital forensic firm Cellebrite, Ian Whiffin and Jessica Hyde, contradicted Green's assessment on the stand.
Whiffin said he had "absolute certainty" that the Google searches were performed shortly after 6:20 a.m., while Hyde told jurors the Safari browser on McCabe's phone was initially searching for a youth sports league, and that the same tab was used four hours later for dying in the cold, prosecutors said.
In its motion on Tuesday, Read's lawyers alleged that Cellebrite after the first trial "completely rid itself of the 2:27:40 a.m. search artifact that is incredibly inconvenient to the case of the Commonwealth."
Read's lawyers said it appeared that Whiffin, whom they described as a "law enforcement-centric" consultant, went back to his company "to have its 'researchers' perform further 'updates' to its Physical Analyzer programs such that the artifact containing the 2:27:40 a.m. timestamp has now suddenly disappeared from ALL Cellebrite programs."
A Cellebrite spokesperson said the defense assertions were false.
"We update our code regularly based on new research and updated understanding on how mobile phone data is stored," Victor Cooper said. "This case underscores the importance of validation. Ian is world-renowned for his decoding expertise, and we fully support and stand behind his scientific findings. His research and methodology for the testing in this specific case was also verified by third-party certified digital forensic examiners."
Separately, the state Supreme Judicial Court is weighing a request from Read's lawyers to dismiss the murder and leaving the scene counts, on the grounds that multiple jurors indicated, either directly or through intermediaries, that the jury unanimously acquitted her of those charges and remained divided only on manslaughter.