Candidates for Norfolk district attorney are calling on current office holder Michael W. Morrissey to resign in the wake of bigoted text messages from a former state trooper in his investigative unit and another officer that were revealed Thursday in a Karen Read lawsuit.
Read’s civil complaint named Michael Proctor, a former State Police trooper who served as lead investigator in her criminal case, and former Canton police sergeant Sean Goode, who responded to the crime scene and testified at her first trial.
Phone records obtained by court orders showed the two men for years sent texts disparaging women, racial minorities, Jewish people, and the LGBTQ community, Read’s suit said.
Read was acquitted last June at her retrial of killing her boyfriend in 2022 in Canton; her lawyers argued she was framed by investigators and civilian witnesses they were close to, prompting a separate federal grand jury probe.
Adam Deitch, a former federal prosecutor who led the federal grand jury investigation, which yielded no criminal charges beyond one grand juror who admitted to leaking sealed information to a friend, is among the candidates seeking to replace Morrissey.
“Michael Morrissey should resign his position as District Attorney effective immediately,” Deitch said Thursday in a statement. “Today’s text message revelations represent a devastating blow to the credibility of the State Police Detective Unit [that Proctor was formerly in before his termination] in Norfolk County and to anyone who supervised them, including and especially Michael Morrissey.”
In a statement, Morrissey’s office blasted the messages cited in Read’s lawsuit, but the office did not respond to the resignation calls.
“The egregious and offensive information discovered on former Trooper Proctor’s personal cell phone is inexcusable,” said Morrissey’s office. “Former Trooper Proctor’s outrageous comments do not reflect the values or beliefs of the hard-working men and women in the Norfolk District Attorney’s Office.”
In the fall of 2025, Morrissey’s office said, prosecutors “began providing the discoverable material on former Trooper Proctor’s personal cell phone to defense counsel in cases in which Proctor was an investigator and to potentially affected entities.”
The office “continues to review cases in which former Trooper Proctor was involved to ensure a fair and ethical prosecution of all defendants,” the statement said.
Read’s lawyers allege in her suit filed Thursday against State Police and the town of Canton that the animus exhibited in Proctor and Goode’s texts, particularly toward women, motivated them to assist in framing Read.
Proctor’s lawyer said Thursday that the evidence of Read’s guilt in her criminal case was “overwhelming.” Goode, who was placed on leave in October and resigned this week, hasn’t responded to requests for comment.
Deitch said Morrissey “and anyone on his executive team bear responsibility for the utter failure in leadership and supervision exposed by today’s news.”
Morrissey is not seeking reelection.
“Although Michael Morrissey decided not to run for re-election, January is not soon enough,” Deitch said. “He needs to resign effective immediately.”
His sentiments were echoed by Djuna Perkins, another former prosecutor running for Norfolk district attorney.
“One year ago, I called on DA Michael Morrissey to resign following a pattern of failures to prosecute egregious crimes, the lack of oversight of the Norfolk County District Attorney’s Office State Police investigative unit, and misguided prosecutorial priorities,” Perkins said Thursday in a statement.
Her citing of a “pattern of failures” to prosecute serious crimes was an apparent reference to Sandra Birchmore, a young woman found dead in her Canton apartment in 2021.
Morrissey’s office initially investigated her death and issued no criminal charges, and the state medical examiner at first ruled that she died by suicide.
But in 2024 the FBI arrested former Stoughton police detective Matthew Farwell on allegations that he strangled Birchmore to keep her from revealing that he began a sexual relationship with her when she was 15.
Farwell has pleaded not guilty and remains held without bail. The state medical examiner’s office, meanwhile, recently changed its ruling on Birchmore’s manner of death from suicide to undetermined.
In Read’s lawsuit filed Thursday, her lawyers cited one text from Goode in which he said Birchmore was “borderline retarded.”
“The newly released text messages [in Read’s suit] further highlight why I called for his resignation last year and have continued to assert the need for a complete overhaul of the DA’s office,” Perkins said.
In a follow-up statement Friday, Perkins called on another candidate in the race, Greg Connor, a former senior prosecutor in Morrissey’s office who left in April, to release all correspondence between himself and Proctor, asserting the two likely worked together on homicide cases.
“And frankly, [Connor] should drop out of the race,” Perkins said.
Reached by phone Friday, Connor said he’s not dropping out and described Perkins’s call for him to do so as a “desperate move by a desperate campaign.”
He said the messages cited in Read’s lawsuit on Proctor’s personal cell phone were “monstrous,” and that if he had seen any such messages in his work correspondence with the trooper, “I would have immediately asked for him to be removed from the office.”
Connor said he and a team of investigators worked expeditiously to get Proctor’s personal messages to defense counsel in all pending cases he worked once the texts came to light, as is required under the law.
“I just can’t get over how disgusting these messages were,” Connor said.
He said he and Proctor had exchanged only brief work-related messages on the three or four cases they worked on together. They did not socialize outside work, Connor said.
Another district attorney candidate, former prosecutor Macy Lee, also said Thursday that she was appalled by the text messages disclosed in Read’s suit, while stopping short of an explicit call for Morrissey to step down.
“The residents of Norfolk County deserve new leadership, who will ensure that they are protected from unlawful police misconduct and discriminatory behavior,” Lee said.
She said that as “an Asian American woman, I find the communications between Proctor and Goode to be personally vile, misogynistic, and racist. As a law enforcement professional, they reveal a culture that is unacceptable and undermines public trust in law enforcement.”
Lee said that if elected she’ll “demand professionalism from my staff and investigators. The focus should always be on public safety, not personal biases. Police officers and investigators who hold such views should not be entrusted with public safety.”
Material from prior Globe stories was used in this report. This story will be updated when more information is released.
Travis Andersen can be reached at travis.andersen@globe.com. Laura Crimaldi can be reached at laura.crimaldi@globe.com. Follow her @lauracrimaldi.