BOSTON — A candidate running for Norfolk County District Attorney is calling on Michael Morrissey to resign from the post after a jury acquitted Karen Read of second-degree murder, a charge she says signals an inexperienced prosecutor.

Dedham resident Djuna Perkins, a former assistant attorney general and head of the Suffolk County DA’s domestic violence unit, is also speaking out against Morrissey for giving John O’Keefe’s family “false hope about the outcome.”

Perkins is seeking to unseat Morrissey after throwing her hat in the political ring for a post that voters will not decide until November 2026.

“Yesterday, a Norfolk County jury found Karen Read not guilty for the death of John O’Keefe in a case that captured international attention,” Perkins wrote in a social media post on Thursday.

“A Boston Police Officer, family member, and friend of so many is dead,” she added. “Meanwhile, the erosion of trust caused by this disastrous prosecution resulted in a crisis with an impact that extends far beyond the borders of Norfolk County.”

Prosecutors accused Read of backing up into O’Keefe, her Boston Police officer boyfriend of two years, with her SUV after yet another drunken bout of fighting in the troubled relationship, leaving him to freeze and die on the front yard of a Canton home where the pair was supposed to continue a night out after the bars closed.

Read had been charged with second-degree murder, motor vehicle manslaughter while operating under the influence, and leaving the scene of an accident causing death in the killing of O’Keefe, in the early morning of Jan. 29, 2022.

But jurors in her retrial convicted Read of just operating under the influence – an outcome that the defense has said is a win since the verdict came out Wednesday.

“No experienced prosecutor would ever have charged Karen Read with second-degree murder in the absence of stronger evidence about how he died,” Perkins stated in her post, “and in light of compelling evidence that Read was too intoxicated to form the intent required to convict her of murder.”

“Charging someone without a good faith basis to believe the Commonwealth can meet the high standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt is unethical,” she added. “I have not spoken to a single current or former prosecutor who believed the evidence supported this charge.”

Perkins highlighted other points backing up her call for Morrissey to resign, a stance she made moments after the jury foreman read the verdict. Hundreds of Read supporters who packed the street outside Norfolk Superior Court for the highly anticipated moment echoed Perkins’ call, chanting “Morrissey resign.”

In response to a Herald request for comment on the verdict and calls to resign, the Norfolk County District Attorney’s Office shared a WBZ news article from earlier Thursday.

“The jury has spoken,” Morrissey told the television news outlet.

Morrissey, who earned $205,973 in total pay last year, made his thoughts known on the Read case in an August 2023 video statement, blasting people on the internet for spreading “baseless” theories.

“We try people in the court and not on the internet for a reason,” the DA said at the time. “The internet has no rules of evidence. The internet has no punishment for perjury. And the internet does not know all the facts.”

He added: “The harassment of witnesses in the murder prosecution of Karen Read is absolutely baseless. It should be an outrage to any decent person — and it needs to stop. Innuendo is not evidence. False narratives are not evidence.”

In her post on Thursday, Perkins pointed to that video, saying it “violated the Massachusetts Rules of Professional Conduct for prosecutors.”

“This is unconscionable behavior for a District Attorney,” she wrote.

Morrissey, 70, was first elected to office in 2010.

Opinion Diagnostics, a Massachusetts-based polling and market research firm, found that only 4% of 1,170 Norfolk County residents who meet the qualifications to be selected as jurors and responded to a post-verdict survey “affirmatively believe” Morrissey deserves reelection.

It’s not just the Karen Read saga that has thrust the DA’s office into massive public scrutiny, Perkins said, referencing the murders of Sandra Birchmore in Canton and Ana Walshe in Cohasset, and the hate-motivated attack on a Brookline kosher grocery store last Sunday, among other high-level cases.

“District Attorney Morrissey’s exclusive focus on the prosecution of Karen Read has come at the expense of all these families,” Perkins said, “and of other efforts that could have been made to prevent crime in our community.”

Ahead of Read’s retrial, Morrissey appointed Hank Brennan, who served for years as a defense attorney for notorious Boston mobster James “Whitey” Bulger, as a special prosecutor for the case.

Brennan, who has not made public comments about the verdict, earned at least $250,000 prosecuting the case.

In an interview on the Howie Carr Show on Thursday, defense attorney Alan Jackson called the Read case the “most challenging … I have ever tried in my life,” pointing to how the prosecution filed a slew of motions “trying to keep our witnesses away from the jurors.”

“Do better. Do better, sir,” Jackson said in response to what his message for Morrissey would be. “You are in the job of seeking justice, you are not in the job of winning cases.”

Perkins echoed Jackson, saying that after salaries, the DA’s office’s $14 million budget “leaves only $2.7 million for all operational expenses.” Morrissey has “spent more than one-third of his entire operating budget for the special prosecutor and expert witnesses on the retrial alone.”

“DA Morrissey doubled- and tripled-down on using every resource possible to prove he was right, rather than seeking justice,” Perkins wrote.

“Worst of all, Morrissey’s decisions in the Karen Read case gave John O’Keefe’s family false hope about the outcome,” she added. “For three years, the family of John O’Keefe has patiently hoped and waited for the promised outcome, riding the emotional roller coaster of every new scandal and facing conflict at the courthouse every day for months at a time, only to have their hopes for justice dashed not once but twice.

“Beyond the grief from the death itself, this experience in the criminal justice system causes devastating emotional harm. The job of the District Attorney is to empower victims of crime, not make them pawns in his quest for validation.”

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