Bristol County District Attorney Prosecutors Fac Suspension Over Misconduct in 2003 Brockton Murder Case

FALL RIVER ─ A Board of Bar Overseers (BBO) disciplinary panel has recommended a high-ranking prosecutor in the Bristol County District Attorney’s office, Karen H. O’Sullivan, be suspended from practicing law for two years in connection with her role in the prosecution of a 17-year-old Asian-American teenager, Frances Choy, accused of killing her parents in a house fire in Brockton in 2003.

O’Sullivan, and her then Plymouth County District Attorney (DA) co-counsel, John E. Bradley Jr., were found to have exchanged racially explicit emails and failed to release important exculpatory evidence in the case against Frances Choy.

The BBO’s panel recommended that Bradley face a one-year and a day suspension.

“In considering this matter as a whole, we are mainly struck by how seriously the respondents’ misconduct undermined the integrity and reputation of prosecutors in the Commonwealth. We cannot minimize the harm to the integrity of our legal system and the administration of justice when the motivations and biases of prosecutors become news,” the three-member panel wrote in a more than 100-page report released on Sept. 3.

After two mistrials, Frances Choy was convicted of two counts of murder and arson in a third trial in 2011, with O’Sullivan and Bradley prosecutors in all three cases. She was 34 years old at the time of her release and spent 17 years in prison.

Frances Choy was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole until September 2020, when a Plymouth County Superior Court judge vacated the convictions, citing new evidence of racial bias by the prosecutors and that “justice may not have been done.” 

The judge found that Frances Choy’s nephew, Kenny Choy, was the culprit. Kenny Choy was given immunity to testify against his aunt in her second trial that ended in a mistrial. Before the third trial, Kenny Choy fled back to his home country of Hong Kong and has never faced prosecution.

One dissent on terms of O’Sullivan punishment

One of the three-member disciplinary board dissented from the recommended two-year suspension for O’Sullivan, calling it, “far too lenient for O’Sullivan’s demonstrated misconduct and I would recommend an indefinite suspension,” and citing the uncharged misconduct during the proceedings among the reasons.

After leaving Plymouth County’s DA’s office, O’Sullivan was hired by the Bristol DA’s office in 2012, where she is currently listed as the agency’s First District Attorney.

She is currently co-prosecuting the first-degree murder trial of Joseph Housley II, accused of killing his father in Seekonk in 2021.

Housley is being represented by Joseph F. Krowski, Jr., whose father, Joseph F. Krowski, was the defense attorney for Choy in all three of her murder and arson trials.

The Bristol County District Attorney’s office, headed by Thomas Quinn III, did not respond to requests for comment, and it is unclear at this time what O’Sullivan’s status is with the prosecutor’s office.

The disciplinary panel’s recommendations will now go to the Supreme Judicial Court for a final ruling. O’Sullivan and Bradley have an opportunity to appeal the decision.

Disciplinary panel most critical of O’Sullivan

The panel questioned the truthfulness of O’Sullivan’s testimony during the 13 hearings conducted between March 2024 and May 2024, and whether she understood the seriousness of the racially infused emails she and Bradley communicated during the trial.

BBO counsel also alleged that O’Sullivan continued acts of professional misconduct after the disciplinary hearings began.

According to the panel’s report, the BBO counsel received an anonymous letter containing allegations that O’Sullivan communicated with an assistant district attorney from the Cape and Islands District Attorney’s office.

The report alleges that O’Sullivan discovered in February 2024 that the Cape and Islands District Attorney, Robert Galibois, was on the witness list. Galibois was the attorney for Kenny Choy during his murder trial, and when the then 17-year-old received immunity to testify against Frances Choy.

O’Sullivan told the disciplinary panel she called the Cape and Islands assistant DA because of emails that had been made public previously, where she described Galibois as “creepy” and expressed concern that the DA would be a fair witness for her.

The panel also identified Bristol County Assistant District Attorney and chief of the homicide unit, Dennis Collins, as attempting to influence another potential witness in the BBO hearings.

He admitted during the disciplinary hearing that he contacted a former Plymouth County assistant district attorney, who had handled Frances Choy’s postconviction appeals case, and when her convictions were overturned. The Plymouth DA’s office at the time declined to try her for a fourth time, which resulted in her release after 17 years in prison.

Collins told the panel he was trying to get the ADA’s “best memory of what he did with respect to the Choy case to help O’Sullivan prepare for the disciplinary hearing.”

ADA Collins admitted to the panel that he also told the former Plymouth prosecutor during their meeting “that he was screwing up or ruining people’s careers.”

Charges were not brought against O’Sullivan and Bradley by the BBO for their actions during the hearings, although the panel acknowledged that the two Bristol County ADA’s violated professional standards.

“She (O’Sullivan) clearly attempted to affect the outcome of this hearing using intermediaries and demonstrated she has no respect for the integrity of the legal or disciplinary system despite her long career as a prosecutor,” wrote the dissenting panelist.

Racial emails and buried evidence

O’Sullivan claimed “no racial animus” when she shared emails with Bradley containing memes and images of Asian people.

The approximately seven emails included a photo of Frances Choy superimposed on the background of a burning building with the caption: “GIRL SCOUTS – Maybe next time you’ll buy the f*cking cookies.”

Another email between Bradley and O’Sullivan referencing that Kenny Choy should try out for the role of the Asian character Long Duk Dong, from the 1980’s movie “Sixteen Candles.”

In another email from O’Sullivan, she suggests incest between Frances Choy and her nephew, Kenny Choy.

Both O’Sullivan and Bradley claimed some of the emails regarding Frances Choy were sent by other people.

“In general, we found her testimony not to be credible,” wrote the panel.

And regarding the exculpatory evidence that O’Sullivan and Bradley failed to produce to the defense team, it was one of the prime reasons that the Plymouth County judge overturned Frances Choy’s conviction.

At issue, police records showed that Kenny Choy could have had a motive to kill Jimmy and Anne Choy. Kenny Choy was the grandson of Jimmy Choy from a previous relationship in Hong Kong.

In January 2003, before the fire, Jimmy Choy had reported to Brockton Police that his grandson was selling drugs and reported him missing after running away from home.

Neither the missing person’s report nor a report about the drug-dealing allegations made its way to Frances Choy’s defense team, although the panel found that the two prosecutors had “not intentionally” withheld the evidence. 

Bradley claimed he had sent the documents to the defense team and O’Sullivan claimed she had no obligation to forward the exculpatory evidence because she was not the lead attorney, and that he assured her he disclosed the reports to the defense.

The panel agreed that Bradley was the lead prosecutor in the case, but even if he had assured her, “that would not have absolved O’Sullivan.

“O’Sullivan was an experienced prosecutor at the time of Frances Choy’s three trials.”