Read’s dismissal appeal denied by state’s highest court

By Jay Turner

The state’s highest court on Tuesday denied an appeal by Karen Read’s legal team to have two of the charges against her dismissed on double jeopardy grounds, clearing the way for her retrial beginning April 1.

Defense attorneys had made the case that Read — 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.

However, as outlined in an opinion written by Justice Serge Georges Jr., the SJC found that the jurors’ claims not only contradicted their “clearly stated” communications to Judge Beverly Cannone at trial, but they were made after a mistrial had already been declared and the jury had been discharged.

“Such posttrial disclosures,” stated Georges, “cannot retroactively alter the trial’s outcome — either to acquit or to convict.”

According to Read’s lawyers, five of the jurors independently had reached out after the trial to insist 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.

Attorney Martin Weinberg, a prominent Boston-based appellate lawyer who joined Read’s team strictly for the purposes of the dismissal motion, had asked the court to “embrace” the new information disclosed by the jurors and call them back for a post-trial inquiry to confirm their “uncontradicted” claims. Not doing so, he argued, would constitute 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.

But the SJC ultimately sided with prosecutors, who noted that the impasse among jurors had been communicated in three separate written notes spread out over days of deliberations, none of which hinted at any type of consensus on any of the charges.

According to the SJC ruling, the jurors, through their “progressively insistent” notes, had offered “no indication that a partial verdict was imminent or possible.”

Georges added that the notes were so definitive that any further inquiry by the presiding judge would have risked producing a “coerced verdict.”

And while Weinberg had argued that the issue could be resolved with a closed-door hearing where Cannone could ask jurors a “simple yes or no question,” the SJC said that doing so would have been a violation of Massachusetts case law. “The jury chose to report a deadlock, not a verdict,” Georges wrote, “and no basis exists for further investigation into private discussions or subjective beliefs they declined to announce publicly in open court.”

Following the decision, Weinberg told reporters that they may file an appeal in federal court.

“While we have great respect for the commonwealth’s highest court, double jeopardy is a federal constitutional right,” Weinberg stated. “We are strongly considering whether to seek federal habeas relief from what we continue to contend are violations of Ms. Read’s federally guaranteed constitutional rights.”

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