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With a little more than 90 days to go before Brian Walshe is scheduled to go to trial for the alleged murder of his wife, Ana, the legal battle between his defense team and Norfolk County prosecutors has intensified.
Walshe’s attorneys are trying to get the digital data that state troopers gathered from his Cohasset household’s devices thrown out — namely, the infamous Google searches he allegedly made on his child’s iPad and location data from his cell phone.
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The center of the defense’s argument is whether or not investigators went beyond the scope of what Walshe gave them consent to search on the devices.
The devices were downloaded and examined before a search warrant was issued in January of 2023, when the case was still a missing person case. Prosecutors are relying on the fact that Walshe willingly turned over his devices during their investigation to find Ana.
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But the defense team is alleging that Walshe was mislead by investigators about what they would be looking for, and that they went beyond the scope of what was agreed upon, which the defense says was mainly communications between Brian and Ana.
The state has fired back at the allegations that the search was illegal — saying that Walshe “freely and voluntarily consented to searches of three digital devices,” adding that the “the searches were conducted within the scope of that consent.”
Prosecutors have maintained that the “incriminating” searches on the iPad were in plain view, and that discovery of the material was inevitable.
In the latest episode of The Searches for Ana Walshe, we go over all of this with NBC10 Boston Chief Legal Analyst Michael Coyne, who breaks down the potential cascading effects any withholding of digital evidence could have on this case, which primarily relies on circumstantial evidence in its prosecution of Walshe.
“It’s a very good legal argument on both sides,” Coyne said. “I think there’s gonna need to be more factual development before we have an answer on that. As to what exactly she’s gonna allow in or out. And if they can’t get that electronic evidence in, that’s a big win for him.”
Coyne also weighs in on what the near-total acquittal of Karen Read last month could mean for Walshe, given that many of the same state investigators out of MSP’s Norfolk County DA’s Office were involved with his investigation.
“You have some hope, if you were him, that you could explore and have that argument resonate with the jury that there is a lack of professionalism, a lack of expertise, and a general sloppiness and rush to judgment that, very well, might be a sufficient basis for his defense to be able to try and establish a reasonable doubt,” Coyne said.
The Searches for Ana Walshe is available wherever you stream podcasts.