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By Jenna Sundel
News Reporter
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A defense attorney for Karen Read, the Massachusetts woman accused of hitting her boyfriend with her car and leaving him out in a snowstorm to die, argued for the dismissal of two of the charges against her on Friday ahead of her new trial.
Read was charged with second-degree murder, vehicular manslaughter while intoxicated and leaving the scene of a collision resulting in death. She allegedly struck her boyfriend John O'Keefe, who worked as a Boston police officer for 16 years, with her SUV and left him to die in January of 2022. His cause of death was ruled hypothermia and blunt force trauma.
Her first trial began on April 16. A mistrial was declared on July 1 during the fifth day of deliberations after jurors remained deadlocked.
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Read's new trial is scheduled to begin on January 27 of next year.
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Her legal team has filed several motions since the mistrial, which claim that several jurors said the jury found Read not guilty of murder and leaving the scene but became deadlocked on the manslaughter charge. The lawyers argued that trying her again on the two charges she was found not guilty on would be unconstitutional.
"We can't just accept a fiction that the jury was at an impasse on all three counts," defense attorney Martin Weinberg said.
Weinberg suggested a closed hearing with the jurors who spoke to the defense and said he hoped prosecutors would join him in arguing against a retrial.
"Order a hearing, judge. Don't make Ms. Read be the first person in the history of the commonwealth to face re-prosecution for murder at the same prosecutor's office that tried to once and failed to persuade the jury she was guilty," Weinberg said.
Assistant Norfolk District Attorney Adam Lally argued against dropping the charges. He said an official written verdict was never returned on the murder and leaving the scene charges.
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"In the final note that was submitted to the court, they refer to the charges in plurality," Lally said.
Lally also said questioning jurors would illegally coerce them into revealing details of their deliberation process.
"Simply put, your honor, what counsel has proposed as far as what the court should do is prohibited by rules, it's prohibited by law and it's prohibited by the development of case law over decades and centuries," Lally said.
He said that the state does not want to retry anyone who has already been acquitted by a jury.
"That's not what's happening here," Lally said.
In a rebuttal, Weinberg said what he is proposing would not be a form of coercion.
"There's no risk of jury coercion when a court is asking the jury whether they reached a verdict on other charges other than the one they were deadlocked on," he said. "There's no risk of jury coercion saying, 'Does your note reflect all charges rather than one?'"
He pointed out that jury instructions ordered the jury to continue deliberations until a final verdict was reached on each charge.
"We don't know whether the jury understood that instruction to mean that we can't come back and tell the court affirmatively that we've reached two decisions, two general verdicts, but we're at an impasse on a third one," Weinberg said.
Judge Beverly Cannone did not make a ruling, but she said she would take the arguments under advisement.
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Who is Karen Read?
Read was a Bentley University finance lecturer in Massachusetts. The school announced in 2022 that she would not be teaching and her Financial Markets and Investment course would be taught be the chair of the finance department instead.
"By now you may have seen or heard the news involving a member of our community and the death of a Boston police officer," said Donna Maria Blancero, Provost & Vice President for Academic Affairs, in a statement at the time. "Karen Read is an adjunct lecturer at Bentley. The university cannot comment on an active investigation, but we are aware of the evolving situation and following it closely."
Blancero had announced that her "thoughts go out to Officer O'Keefe's family and loved ones."
On LinkedIn, Read still lists herself as a part of Bentley's faculty. Read had graduated from Bentley's Elkin B. McCallum Graduate School of Business in 2004 and she has a BS in Finance from the college as well. She wrote that she graduated from an accelerated studies program for her undergraduate in three years. Read also listed she was a "Presidential Scholar" in both 1999 and 2000.
Read's LinkedIn also shows her currently working at Fidelity Investments for equity research within the tech sector. Previously, she was a financial analyst at Sensata Technolgies, client account manager at Brown Brothers Harriman, and a trading room assistant at Hughey Center for Financial Services.
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Who was John O'Keefe?
The Boston Police Department remembered O'Keefe as a "kind person, dedicated to his family," in a Facebook post in 2022.
He grew up in Braintree and graduated from Northeastern University. O'Keefe also earned a master's degree in criminal justice from UMass Lowell.
O'Keefe was a 16-year veteran of the Boston Police Department. He lived in Canton, where he was raising his niece and nephew since his sister and brother-in-law's death.
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