Judge refuses to dismiss Karen Read murder case after July mistrial

A judge ruled that Karen Read can be retried on charges of murder and leaving the scene of a crime in connection with the death of her boyfriend, a Boston police officer, rejecting arguments made to attorneys after the mistrial that jurors had unanimously concluded that Karen Read was not guilty on both counts.

Read, 44, is accused of driving her SUV into a January 2022 snowstorm and leaving John O'Keefe for dead. Her two-month trial ended in July when jurors said they were hopelessly deadlocked and a judge declared a mistrial on the fifth day of deliberations.

Judge Beverly Cannone's decision, released Friday, means the case can go to trial, which is scheduled for Jan. 27.

Prosecutors said Read, a former adjunct 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 police officer. They said she hit him with her SUV before driving away. An autopsy found O'Keefe died of hypothermia and blunt force trauma.

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The defense portrayed Read as the victim, saying O'Keefe was actually killed in Albert's house and then dragged outside. They argued that investigators focused on Read because she was a “convenient outsider” who spared them from considering police officers as suspects.

After the mistrial, Read's lawyers presented evidence that four jurors said they actually disagreed only on a third count of manslaughter, and in the jury room they unanimously agreed that Read was innocent 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 or even thought she hit him on purpose,” her lawyers argued.

The defense also said the judge abruptly declared a mistrial without first asking each juror whether they could confirm his conclusions on each count. Read's attorney, Marty Weinberg, had asked Cannone to call the jury back to court for more questions.

However, the judge said the jury did not inform the court during its deliberations that it had already reached a verdict on any of the charges. “Since no verdict was announced in open court, reopening the case against the defendant does not violate the principle of double jeopardy,” Cannone said in her verdict.

Prosecutors had asked the judge to dismiss a “meritless but sensational post-trial lawsuit” that was based on “hearsay, conjecture and a legally inappropriate reliance on the content of the jury's deliberations.”

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Assistant District Attorney Adam Lally argued that at no point did the jury indicate that it had already reached a verdict on the charges, that it was given clear instructions on how to reach a verdict, and that the defense had ample opportunity to object to a declaration of mistrial.

“It's very unusual for the jury to say, 'Oh, wait a minute, we have a verdict,'” said Michael Coyne, dean of the Massachusetts School of Law. “And then the defendant tries to argue that the verdict that should have been announced in open court was not guilty and therefore she would face double jeopardy if the trial were reopened – that's what's unusual about it.”

Coyne said the jury provided well-written notes explaining that they had reached an impasse on the charges before them, but they could also have reported that they had reached a partial verdict.

“You would think that common sense would eventually tell you, 'You know, we can't decide everything, but we decided some things,'” Coyne said. “I mean, most people, most employees wouldn't say they completely failed at their job, they would say, 'We were able to solve some things, but we can't do everything.' And that wasn't done here.”