Karen Read asks Massachusetts Supreme Court to drop two charges

BOSTON – Attorneys for Karen Read have appealed to the Massachusetts Supreme Court a judge’s refusal to dismiss two of the three criminal charges against her.

Read, 44, is accused of ramming her boyfriend, a Boston police officer, John O’Keefe, with her SUV and leaving him to die during a snowstorm in January 2022. 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.

Last month, Judge Beverly Cannone denied a defense request to drop several charges, and prosecutors set a new trial for January 2025. But Read’s lawyers appealed the ruling to the state Supreme Court on Wednesday, arguing that re-trying her on two of the charges would amount to unconstitutional double jeopardy.

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.

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 were actually divided only on a third count of manslaughter. In the jury room, they unanimously agreed that Read was innocent of first-degree murder and leaving the scene of a fatal accident. One juror told them that “no one believed she hit him on purpose,” her lawyers argued.

However, the judge said the jury did not tell the court during their deliberations that they had already reached a verdict on any of the charges.

“Since no verdict was announced in public, the reopening of the case against the defendant does not violate the principle of double jeopardy,” Cannone said in her statement.