BOSTON — Attorneys for Karen Read have appealed to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court a judge’s refusal to dismiss two of three criminal charges against her.
Read, 44, is accused of hitting her Boston police officer boyfriend John O’Keefe with her SUV and leaving him for dead during a snowstorm in January 2022. Her two-month trial period ended in July when jurors declared they were hopelessly deadlocked and a judge declared a mistrial on the fifth day of deliberations.
Last month, Judge Beverly Cannone denied a defense motion to dismiss several charges, and prosecutors scheduled a new trial for January 2025. But Read’s attorneys appealed that ruling to the state Supreme Court on Wednesday, arguing that retrying Read on two of the charges would amount to unconstitutional double jeopardy.
Prosecutors said Read, a former associate professor at Bentley College, and O’Keefe, a 16-year-old Boston police officer, 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 struck 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 that O’Keefe had in fact been murdered in Albert’s home and then dragged outside. They argued that investigators focused on Read because she was a “convenient outsider” who prevented them from considering police officers as suspects.
After the mistrial, Read’s attorneys presented evidence that four jurors had said they were deadlocked only on a third charge of manslaughter, and that in the jury room they had unanimously found Read not guilty of second-degree murder and leaving the scene of a fatal accident. One juror told them that “no one thought she hit him on purpose,” her attorneys argued.
However, the judge said the jurors had not informed the court during their deliberations that they had reached a verdict on any of the charges.
“In the absence of a verdict in open court, a new trial of the accused does not violate the principle of double jeopardy,” Cannone said in her ruling.