DEDHAM, Mass. – A judge ruled that Karen Read can be retried for murder and leaving the crime scene in the death of her Boston police officer boyfriend, dismissing arguments that jurors told lawyers after the mistrial that they had unanimously agreed she wasn’t guilty on the two charges.
Read, 44, is accused of ramming into John O’Keefe with her SUV and leaving him for dead in a January 2022 snowstorm. Her two-month trial ended in July when jurors declared they were hopelessly deadlocked and a judge declared a mistrial on the fifth day of deliberations.
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Judge Beverly Cannone’s decision, released on Friday, means the case can move forward to a new trial set to begin Jan. 27.
Prosecutors said Read, a former adjunct professor at Bentley College, and O’Keefe, a 16-year member of the Boston police, had been drinking heavily before she dropped him off at a party at the home of Brian Albert, a fellow Boston officer. They said she hit him with her SUV before driving away. An autopsy found O’Keefe died of hypothermia and blunt force trauma.
The defense portrayed Read as the victim, saying O’Keefe was actually killed inside Albert’s home and then dragged outside. They argued that investigators focused on Read because she was a “convenient outsider” who saved them from having to consider law enforcement officers as suspects.
After the mistrial, Read's lawyers presented evidence that four jurors had said they were actually deadlocked only on a third count of manslaughter, and that inside the jury room, they had unanimously agreed that Read was innocent of second-degree murder and leaving the scene of a deadly accident. One juror told them that “no one thought she hit him on purpose or even thought she hit him on purpose,” her lawyers argued.
The defense also said the judge abruptly announced the mistrial in court without first asking each juror to confirm their conclusions about each count. Read’s attorney Marty Weinberg had asked Cannone to consider summoning the jurors back to court for more questions.
But the judge said the jurors didn't tell the court during their deliberations that they had reached a verdict on any of the counts. “Where there was no verdict announced in open court here, retrial of the defendant does not violate the principle of double jeopardy," Cannone said in her ruling.
Prosecutors had urged the judge to dismiss what they called an “unsubstantiated but sensational post-trial claim” based on “hearsay, conjecture and legally inappropriate reliance as to the substance of jury deliberations.”
Assistant District Attorney Adam Lally argued that the jury never indicated they had reached a verdict on any of the charges, were given clear instructions on how to reach a verdict, and that the defense had ample opportunity to object to a mistrial declaration.
“It's very unusual to actually have after the fact, after the mistrial has been declared, for jurors to say, ‘Oh, wait a minute, we had a verdict,'” said Michael Coyne, dean of the Massachusetts School of Law. “And now for the defendant then to try and argue that the verdict that should have been announced in open court would be not guilty, and therefore should be subject to double jeopardy if you retried her — that's what unusual about it. ”
Coyne said the jurors brought forth well written notes saying they were at an impasse on the charges before them, but they also could have reported that they had reached a partial verdict.
“You would think that common sense at some point would say, 'Well, you know, we can't decide the whole thing, but we have decided a few things,'" Coyne said. “I mean most people, most employees would not say that they failed the job completely, but, ‘We were able to resolve some things, but we can't do it all.' And that wasn't done here.”
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Associated Press reporter Kathy McCormack in Concord, New Hampshire, contributed to this story.