Defense attorneys have filed formal arguments with the state’s highest court as they move to have two of the criminal charges against Karen Read dismissed.
Karen Read's lawyers have officially filed their brief to Massachusetts' highest court, which just last week agreed to review the case.
Wednesday was the deadline to get those briefs in, and in documents filed a short time ago, her lawyers are asking the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court to look at Judge Beverly Cannone's refusal to dismiss two of the three criminal charges against her, including murder.
It's been revealed that the jury was in fact unanimous that she was not guilty of those two charges and the defense says trying her on those charges would amount to double jeopardy.
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. Oral arguments could begin as soon as November.
Review the defense team's full filing below:
Read, 44, is accused of ramming into O’Keefe with her SUV and leaving him for dead during 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.
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.
Prosecutors have scheduled a new trial for January of 2025.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
