BOSTON—An attorney for Karen Read has petitioned the highest court in Massachusetts seeking the dismissal of two charges including murder that she faces in the death of her Boston police officer boyfriend.
Read is accused of ramming into John O’Keefe with her SUV and leaving him for dead in a snowstorm in January 2022. Read’s attorneys argue she is being framed and that someone else is responsible for O’Keefe’s death.
The brief filed Tuesday to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court argues that trying her again on charges of second-degree murder and leaving the scene would be unconstitutional double jeopardy. A judge last summer declared a mistrial after jurors couldn’t reach agreement on her case.
The defense attorneys said five jurors came forward after her mistrial saying they were deadlocked only on a manslaughter count, and had agreed without telling the judge that she wasn’t guilty on the other counts.
In August, a judge ruled Read can be retried on those charges and a new trial is set for January. “Where there was no verdict announced in open court here, retrial of the defendant does not violate the principle of double jeopardy,” the judge, Beverly Cannone, said in her ruling.
But Read’s attorney, Martin Weinberg, challenged the decision in his brief, arguing it was wrong to suggest that a double jeopardy challenge couldn’t successfully be mounted — even if all 12 jurors attested to a decision to acquit Read on those two charges.
“Surely, that cannot be the law. Indeed, it must not be the law,” Weinberg wrote.
“And, in the context of this highly publicized case, it strains credulity to suggest that, if the unequivocal statements of five jurors quoted above did not, in fact, represent the unanimous view of all 12, the remaining jurors would allow the inaccuracy to go uncorrected,” he wrote. “Instead, they would predictably have notified the Commonwealth or the court of their own recollection.”
The Norfolk District Attorney’s Office has until Oct. 16 to file its response.
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 had 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.
The lead investigator on the case, State Trooper Michael Proctor, was relieved of duty after the trial revealed he’d sent vulgar texts to colleagues and family, calling Read a “whack job” and telling his sister he wished Read would “kill herself.” He said that was a figure of speech and that his emotions had gotten the better of him.
Sgt. Yuri Bukhenik, another state witness who was Proctor’s supervisor, also lost vacation days for failing to reprimand Proctor for his offensive texts, according to The Boston Globe. Canton Police Det. Kevin Albert, the brother of Brian Albert, also was reprimanded for drinking on the job with Proctor — which came up during the Read trial, the newspaper reported.
In its brief, the defense also argued that the judge abruptly announced the mistrial in court without first asking each juror to confirm their conclusions about each count.
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.
By Michael Casey