Supreme Judicial Court deliberating Karen Read appeal

By Jay Turner

Karen Read’s effort to have two of the charges against her dismissed on double jeopardy grounds is now in the hands of the state’s highest court after lawyers for both sides presented their oral arguments during a hearing held in Boston last Wednesday, November 6.

As detailed in their motion filed in September with the Supreme Judicial Court, Read’s camp has argued that the defendant — who has been charged but continues to proclaim her innocence in the January 2022 death of her boyfriend, Boston Police Officer and Canton resident John O’Keefe — should have already been acquitted of both second-degree murder and leaving the scene of a fatal accident, citing statements from multiple jurors who claim they had reached unanimous agreement that Read was not guilty.

All told, Read’s lawyers say they heard from five jurors, including four directly, who claim “in no uncertain terms” that they had a “firm and unwavering 12-0 agreement” that Read was not guilty on the first and third charges. The only disagreement, they said, was over the second charge of manslaughter while operating under the influence.

Having already gone through one highly sensationalized, 10-week trial that ended in a mistrial this past July, and subsequently failing to convince Norfolk Superior Court Judge Beverly Cannone to alter her original declaration, Read’s lawyers have now turned to the SJC in hopes of preventing what they claim would be a grave injustice and a clear violation of the double jeopardy clause of the Fifth Amendment, which prohibits the government from prosecuting citizens for the same crime twice.

At last week’s hearing, Attorney Martin Weinberg, a prominent Boston-based appellate lawyer who joined Read’s team strictly for the purposes of the dismissal motion, reiterated a request he had previously made to Judge Cannone — to “embrace” the new information disclosed by members of the original jury and call them back for a post-trial inquiry to confirm their “uncontradicted” claims.

While recognizing the privacy of jury deliberations, Weinberg argued that the answer could still be ascertained by a simple yes or no question and without probing into the contents of their deliberations. “The values at stake here are too important,” he insisted.

On the issue of whether there was a “manifest necessity” to declare a mistrial, Weinberg argued that Judge Cannone had a few “viable” options before issuing her declaration, including asking the jury whether they were deadlocked on all three charges against Read.

He also claimed that neither Read nor her attorneys were given an opportunity to voice any objections before the declaration was made. (Judge Cannone, in her 21-page decision denying the defendant’s dismissal motion, strongly pushed back against the latter claim, stating that Read’s attorneys were “no shrinking violets” throughout the duration of the trial and that it “strains credulity” to believe they would have hesitated to voice an objection if they had one.)

But even if the judge’s declaration appeared swift on the surface, prosecutor Caleb Schillinger noted that it came after three different notes from the jury, spread out over several days of deliberations, communicating that they were at an impasse, including a final note that indicated that any further deliberation would be futile. Schillinger further stressed that it was Read’s lawyers, and not prosecutors, who had repeatedly urged the judge to give a Tuey-Rodriguez instruction — a legal “dynamite charge” that is reserved for when juries are deadlocked, reminding them of their duty …

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