BOSTON (WHDH) – The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court upheld the trial judge Beverly Cannone’s decision to deny dismissal of two of the charges against Karen Read on Tuesday.
Karen Read’s re-trial for the murder of her boyfriend, Boston police officer John O’Keefe, will continue as planned; proceedings are currently scheduled to begin on April 1.
Read’s defense team requested dismissal of two of the charges against her, arguing that several jurors, after the mistrial was declared, told them that Read had actually been acquitted by the jury, despite jury communications with Cannone during deliberations that explicitly stated they were deadlocked on the charges.
In August, Cannone rejected the defense’s request for dismissal of those two charges, a decision affirmed in Tuesday’s filing by the SJC.
“[… T]he trial judge correctly denied the defendant’s motion to dismiss and request for a posttrial juror inquiry,” the SJC ruling released Tuesday said. “The case is remanded to the county court for entry of a judgment denying the defendant’s petition for relief.”
Background on the rejected request for dismissal
Read was charged with several charges including second degree murder after prosecutors said she hit O’Keefe with her car and left him to die outside the Canton home of another Boston police officer in January 2022.
Her defense has said she is being framed, saying O’Keefe actually died after a fight inside the home.
The prosecution and the defense called more than 70 witnesses before the case went to the jury in late June 2024.
Jurors deliberated but did not deliver a verdict, prompting Cannone to declare a mistrial after nearly five days of deliberations.
The Norfolk County District Attorney’s office said it planned to re-try Read following the mistrial. Read’s defense attorneys said they would continue fighting allegations against her.
As both sides began eying a new trial, the defense said it heard from several jurors who said they were unanimous in agreeing Read was not guilty of second degree murder and leaving the scene of an accident causing death. The defense said jurors claimed they were only deadlocked on the charge of manslaughter.
In various filings, the defense argued Cannone should have handled the final days of the trial differently, saying jurors reported being confused about the process that ended with Cannone declaring a mistrial.
The defense argued re-trying Read on charges of second degree murder and leaving the scene of an accident would amount to double jeopardy due to the jury’s purported agreement in deliberations. The prosecution pushed back, saying deliberations are private and arguing such an agreement would not have amounted to an acquittal since the jury did not deliver a verdict in open court.
Cannone heard arguments from the defense and the prosecution in a hearing in July.
In her 21-page decision from August, Cannone cited legal precedent in saying the court recognizes “that the bar on retrials following acquittals is ‘[p]erhaps the most fundamental rule in the history of double jeopardy jurisprudence.’”
“However, where there was no acquittal on any of the charges in the defendant’s first trial, there is no risk of subjecting the defendant to double jeopardy on all the charges,” Cannone continued.
SJC agrees with Cannone, Read to be retried on all charges
In their filing Tuesday, the SJC outlined the reasoning why double jeopardy would not apply in Read’s case and why she was not acquitted by the jury, which repeatedly reported being deadlocked to Cannone.
“[…] Because the jury did not publicly affirm that the defendant was not guilty of the charges, there was no acquittal barring retrial under the double jeopardy clause,” the ruling reads. “The jury chose to report a deadlock, not a verdict, and no basis exists for further investigation into private discussions or subjective beliefs they declined to announce publicly in open court.”
Any sort of posttrial questions of jurors would not be acceptable to the court, the filing explains.
“A posttrial inquiry of these jurors would similarly occur well after they became susceptible to outside influences and would not provide a recognized basis for altering the result of the first trial,” it reads.
“Can posttrial accounts of jurors’ private deliberations that are inconsistent with their public communications in court render the declaration of a mistrial improper, or constitute an acquittal, where the jury did not announce or record a verdict in open court? We conclude that they cannot. The jury clearly stated during deliberations that they had not reached a unanimous verdict on any of the charges and could not do so. Only after being discharged did some individual jurors communicate a different supposed outcome, contradicting their prior notes. Such posttrial disclosures cannot retroactively alter the trial’s outcome — either to acquit or to convict.”
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