Karen Read’s lawyers appeal murder charge to Massachusetts’ highest court

Karen Read’s attorneys have taken their argument that the murder charge against her be dropped all the way to the state’s highest court.

The appeal filed Wednesday to the Supreme Judicial Court is impounded, at least for the time being. Read’s attorney Martin Weinberg filed the appeal as he has been the lead counsel on petitions for the charges of second-degree murder and leaving the scene of an accident resulting in death to be dropped.

Read’s trial defense attorneys David Yannetti and Alan Jackson have supported Weinberg’s motion for the dismissal of the charges in affidavits in which they say a number of jurors from the trial, which was declared a mistrial due to a hung jury, have since come forward to say the jury was unanimous in finding that Read was not guilty on those two charges.

The jurors told them, they wrote in their affidavits, that the jury was only split on a subsection of Count 2: manslaughter while operating a motor vehicle under the influence.

Read, 44, of Mansfield, faced those charges in a nine-week trial that ended in mistrial on July 1, the fifth day of jury deliberations.

The charges stem from the death of Boston Police Officer John O’Keefe, Read’s boyfriend of two years at the time of his death in the early morning of Jan. 29, 2022. Prosecutors say Read struck him with her SUV outside a Canton home and left his body on the lawn to freeze and die.

“The defense respectfully renews its contention that the jury acquitted Ms. Read on Counts 1 and 3, or, alternatively, there was no manifest necessity for a mistrial as to those counts, and therefore the Double Jeopardy protections of the federal and state Constitutions require that those counts not be retried,” the defense wrote in a supplemental memo in July.

The efforts to have those two charges dismissed in Read’s new trial scheduled for January failed at the Norfolk Superior Court level when Judge Beverly J. Cannone last month denied the motion.

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“After careful consideration,” the judge wrote in her order, “this Court concludes that because the defendant was not acquitted of any charges and defense counsel consented to the court’s declaration of a mistrial, double jeopardy is not implicated by the retrial of the defendant.”

Weinberg said then that the team would appeal Cannone’s decision.

“We respectfully but strongly disagree with the cornerstones of today’s rulings and intend a vigorous appeal to assert and uphold Ms. Read’s rights based on the Double Jeopardy Clause,” Weinberg said in a statement following the ruling.

This is a developing story.

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