Court asked to dismiss murder charge against Karen Read in the death of her police officer boyfriend

BOSTON (AP) — An attorney for Karen Read has filed a petition in Massachusetts’ highest court seeking to dismiss two charges, including murder, that she faces in the death of her Boston police officer boyfriend.

Read is accused of hitting John O’Keefe with her SUV and leaving him for dead in a snowstorm in January 2022. Read’s lawyers say she is being framed and that someone else is responsible for O’Keefe’s death .

The brief filed Tuesday in the Massachusetts Supreme Court argues that retrying her on charges of second-degree murder and leaving the scene would be unconstitutional double jeopardy. A judge last summer declared a mistrial after jurors could not reach an agreement on her case.

Defense attorneys said five jurors showed up after her mistrial, saying they were deadlocked only on one count of involuntary manslaughter and agreed without telling the judge she was not guilty of the other charges.

In August, a judge ruled that Read could be retried on those charges, and a new trial is set for January. “Where no verdict has been announced in open court here, the defendant’s retrial does not violate the principle of double jeopardy,” the judge, Beverly Cannone, said in her ruling.

But Read’s attorney, Martin Weinberg, contested the decision in his filing, arguing that it was wrong to suggest that a double jeopardy challenge could not be successfully mounted — even though all 12 jurors acquitted Read of these two charges.

“Certainly, that cannot be the law. Indeed, it need 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 the five jurors quoted above did not in fact represent the unanimous opinion of all 12, the remaining jurors would allow the inaccuracy to be correct,” he wrote. “Instead, they would probably have notified the Commonwealth or the court of their own recollection.”

The Norfolk District Attorney’s Office has until Oct. 16 to file a 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 dropping him off at a party at the home of Boston police officer Brian Albert . . They said she hit him with her SUV before driving off. An autopsy found O’Keefe died of hypothermia and blunt force trauma.

The defense presented Read as the victim, saying O’Keefe was actually killed in Albert’s home and then dragged outside. They argued that investigators focused on Read because she was a “convenient stranger” who kept them from having to consider law enforcement officers as suspects.

The lead investigator on the case, State Trooper Michael Proctor, was cleared of duty after the trial revealed he sent vulgar messages to colleagues and family, calling Read “a piece of crap” and telling his sister he would wish Read would “kill himself. ” He said that this was a figure of speech and that his emotions got the better of him.

Sgt. Yuri Bukhenik, another state witness who was Proctor’s supervisor, forfeited his vacation days for not reprimanding Proctor for his offensive texts, according to The Boston Globe. Canton Police Det. Kevin Albert, Brian Albert’s brother, was also reprimanded for drinking on the job with Proctor — who appeared during Read’s trial, the newspaper reported.

In its brief, the defense also argued that the judge suddenly announced a mistrial without first asking each juror to confirm their findings on each count.

Prosecutors urged the judge to dismiss what they called a “baseless but sensational post-trial motion” based on “hearsay, conjecture and legally inappropriate reliance on the substance of the jury’s deliberations.”

Assistant U.S. 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 declaration to quash the suit.