Jury selection begins on Tuesday in the trial of Matthew Farwell, the former Stoughton police officer accused of strangling a young pregnant woman he had allegedly been sexually exploiting since she was a teenager in a police youth program.
Prospective jurors are set to fill out questionnaires on Tuesday, and lawyers could begin questioning them one by one starting Thursday, court papers show. Prosecutors want 16 jurors seated, 12 to deliberate and four alternates, and Judge Casper’s goal is to have the panel chosen by the end of the week. Testimony is expected to run about a month, with more than 100 possible witnesses and hundreds of exhibits on the lists, including thousands of text messages between Mr. Farwell and Sandra Birchmore.
Ms. Birchmore was 23 when she was found dead in her Canton apartment on Feb. 4, 2021. She had met Mr. Farwell as a teenager in the police Explorers program, where he was an instructor. Prosecutors say he groomed her for child sexual abuse, began an illegal sexual relationship with her when he was 27 and she was 15, met her for sex while on duty, and killed her in the end to keep all of it from coming to light.
Mr. Farwell has pleaded not guilty. His lawyers say Ms. Birchmore took her own life, citing what they describe as a history of mental illness and suicide attempts, and that she was upset because he was breaking off the relationship. DNA testing has excluded Mr. Farwell as the father of her fetus.
The case took an unusual route to trial. Norfolk District Attorney Michael W. Morrissey led the first investigation and concluded that Ms. Birchmore died by suicide, that there was “no evidence of foul play.” He brought no charges. Then, in 2024, the FBI arrested Mr. Farwell, pointing to medical experts who reviewed her autopsy and found evidence she had been killed. That path has fed a wider argument in Massachusetts about whether the first inquiry was adequate and whether Mr. Farwell’s badge shielded him from scrutiny.
The central dispute at trial will be the manner of death, and jurors are expected to spend long stretches hearing specialists describe Ms. Birchmore’s injuries and offer conflicting opinions about what caused them.
Mr. Farwell has twice tried, and failed, to have the trial moved out of Massachusetts, arguing that coverage of the case has tainted the jury pool and produced “widespread public belief” in his guilt. The case has drawn print stories, podcasts, television and YouTube broadcasts, and a Facebook page called “Justice for Sandra Birchmore” counts about 21,000 members.
That reach makes screening the pool delicate work. The questions on the form have not been disclosed, but lawyers are expected to probe what prospective jurors know about the case, their views of law enforcement and whether they have experienced sexual or domestic abuse. Knowing about the case would not by itself disqualify anyone, said Victor Hansen, who teaches at New England Law Boston; it would mean deeper questions about whether that knowledge would steer a verdict.
Nancy Gertner, a retired federal judge, said potential jurors should face open-ended questions. “It’s not just like a spigot: ‘Do you know anything about it, yes or no?’” said Ms. Gertner, now a senior lecturer at Harvard Law School. “It is: ‘What do you know?’” The person who has followed the case intently, she said, is “a dangerous juror for either side,” because the details in their heads are “not details that would come out at trial.”
Alan Tuerkheimer, a jury consultant in Chicago, said the case’s path could split the pool: some jurors may resent the federal government stepping in after state prosecutors passed, while others may see it as a necessary check on local authorities. The sexual-abuse allegations add another burden, he said. “You’ll have some jurors that wouldn’t be able to do it,” Mr. Tuerkheimer said. “It could bring back some trauma they’ve experienced, and they just might not be able to sit through it.”
The stakes of getting the jury wrong stretch well past opening day. In 2024, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit ordered an investigation into whether the jury that condemned the Boston Marathon bomber, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, included two people who had shown bias against him on social media before they were sworn in. The findings have not been announced; if they hold up, Mr. Tsarnaev would get a new trial on whether he should be executed or spend life in prison.
Mark L. Wolf, a retired federal judge who presided over the original death-penalty trial of the serial killer Gary Lee Sampson and the hearings that exposed Whitey Bulger’s ties to the FBI, said jury selection is as much art as science. In 2011 he ordered a new trial for Mr. Sampson after finding that jurors who had years earlier recommended his execution had withheld that during screening. “This is where judges have to exercise judgment,” Mr. Wolf said. “If you don’t probe these things, something can come out later that can affect the fairness of the trial.”