Judge to review Peabody exam scam trial facts

BOSTON – Suffolk Superior Court Judge Margaret Hinkle will take a full week to absorb the facts before making a decision in the case against Peabody Police Lt. Edward Bettencourt after hearing closing arguments Friday.55-year-old Bettencourt was indicted by a grand jury in October 2006 on 21 counts of unauthorized access to a computer. The Attorney General’s office believes that he looked up the confidential information of 20 Peabody police officers and one Salem officer, then created false accounts on the Massachusetts Human Resource Division’s Civil Service Exam Applicant Web site to view their promotional exam scores. All such events reportedly took place during his midnight shift as a watch commander at the station on Christmas morning of 2004.Throughout the seven days of trial, Commonwealth prosecutors Ina Howard-Hogan and Kathleen Healey maintained that Bettencourt violated the trust of his fellow officers and the community in which he grew up. They brought in over 40 witnesses, including computer forensic experts and dispatchers, as well as officers, all of whom deny ever creating an account or granting permission for anyone else to do so during the time of the incident.They argued that computer user number 400, which belonged specifically to Bettencourt, was associated to all searches that took place from within the watch commander’s office.For them, the case was a done deal. Bettencourt was the watch commander on duty, it was his ID number under which the searches were conducted, and videotape footage placed him at the police station during the hours the crime occurred.However, defense attorney Douglas Louison repeatedly pushed the fact that security at the Peabody Police Department was lax, leaving a large window of opportunity for anyone to log in under Bettencourt’s number and conduct the illegal searches unbeknownst to him. He noted time discrepancies, false testimonies, and poor investigation by the police and the Attorney General’s office as obvious reasons to dismiss the case in its entirety. In other words, he believed the Commonwealth’s case to be “a flawed house of cards.”During Louison’s closing arguments he reminded Hinkle, who holds Bettencourt’s fate in her hands because he waived his right to a jury trial, that user number 400 was logged into the watch commander’s computer, but it had been for days before and after the incident. He also noted that, as testified by several police officers, it wasn’t uncommon for members of the station to conduct work under someone else’s number, and more specifically, on the watch commander’s computer.He said the Commonwealth “skipped over” those important details.As for the number of witnesses who testified to not creating their own account, Louison said not one of them could place Bettencourt in front of the watch commander’s computer.Louison said that it’s “illogical” and “impossible” for Bettencourt to have run back and forth between his office and the LEAPS computer terminal located adjacent to the dispatchers room without anyone seeing him. Nor does it make sense, according to evidence produced by the Commonwealth, that searches were conducted essentially simultaneously from the two different computers.”There are too many little failed pieces,” he told the Court.Louison believes the testimony of Sgt. Michael Breen, the Commonwealth’s only eyewitness, to be quite possibly be the largest “little failed piece.””It is neither credible nor reliable,” he said, of the man he believed falsely testified for both the grand jury and the trial.Howard retaliated in her closing argument by saying that evidence showed Bettencourt using the watch commander’s computer to look up personal email accounts and make vacation reservations. She agreed that Bettencourt was in and out of the station that night, but the accounts were only created during the times in which he was present. She also noted that of the accounts, his was the only account not opened, as he had checked his score jus