Karen Read’s federal appeal was denied and her state retrial can proceed with all three charges, including murder, intact.

“The district court’s decision is affirmed,” Judge Lara E. Montecalvo wrote in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit’s decision issued Thursday afternoon. “Read’s motion to stay the state court proceedings pending appeal is denied as moot.”

The 22-page decision was the Read defense team’s latest in a series of losses to dismiss her case or at least delay the retrial scheduled to begin Tuesday at Norfolk Superior Court in Dedham.

Read, 45, of Mansfield is charged with second-degree murder, manslaughter while operating a motor vehicle under the influence, and leaving the scene of an accident causing death. She’s accused of killing Boston Police Officer John O’Keefe, her boyfriend of about two years at the time, on Jan. 29, 2022. She was tried last year, but that ended in mistrial.

Shortly after the July 1, 2024, mistrial, the defense team said that members of the trial jury had come forward to say that the jury, despite three increasingly assertive notes indicating an impasse, was only hung on the manslaughter charge and was ready to acquit on the other two charges, including manslaughter, but did not know they could return a partial verdict.

This, the defense team says, means that to retry Read on the two charges the jury would have acquitted her on would be a violation of her constitutional protections from Double Jeopardy — or being tried again on the same charges after being found innocent.

The argument failed first before the trial judge, Beverly J. Cannone, who will preside over the retrial as well. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court then upheld Cannone’s ruling. The defense then went to the federal district court in Boston for a habeas corpus argument — they wanted the federal courts to free Read of unjust prosecution, based on the Double Jeopardy argument.

U.S. District Court Chief Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV denied the Read argument. On Thursday, the First Circuit backed up his decision.

Cannone also on Wednesday denied an unrelated defense motion to dismiss the case on the grounds of “extraordinary governmental misconduct.”

The arguments

The defense says that Cannone “made a ‘precipitous decision’ in declaring a mistrial,” Montecalvo wrote in summary, and “did not consider alternatives to declaring a mistrial or even discuss the possibility of a mistrial with the parties.”

Had Cannone questioned the jurors further as to their verdict, the defense argues, it could have been discovered they were actually ready to acquit.

Saylor in his denial of the habeas request wrote that for Cannone to inquired further would have been tantamount to coercion of the jurors to reach a decision even if they hadn’t and is prohibited by state law. He found there was “manifest necessity” to order a mistrial. The First Circuit affirmed this finding.

The prosecution argues that “the trial court took careful steps,” Montecalvo summarized, “… and only declared a mistrial when it was clear, after the third such note, that the jury was truly deadlocked.”

The First Circuit found that the defense argument is only bolstered by post-trial information that was not available when Cannone had to make her decision. The court found that Cannone followed protocol.

“On their face, the notes appear to make a series of definite assertions that the jury could not reach any unanimous verdict. Thus, while it would have been within the court’s discretion … to inquire into the existence of a partial verdict, there was no apparent need to do so here,” Montecalvo wrote. “ … Considering the information the court had before it, there was no readily apparent alternative to declaring a mistrial.”