The Karen Read legal defense team is asking to push the second murder trial back by more than three weeks to allow time for their federal appeal to run its course.
Delaying the trial date from April 1 to much later in the month “is necessary to permit Ms. Read to appeal the denial of her federal Double Jeopardy claims, which the federal district court expressly found to be ‘substantial,’ to the First Circuit Court of Appeals prior to being forced to undergo a retrial that Ms. Read contends would violate her rights,” the Wednesday motion signed by her five attorneys states.
The filing asks for “on or before April 25” but then later requests April 28 “or the first available date thereafter.”
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.
This federal appeal is the latest effort to have her case — or at least two of the three charges against her — tossed after the defense says five jurors contacted them after last year’s mistrial to say they were only hung on the manslaughter charge and were ready to acquit on the other two.
They first took the double jeopardy protection claims — which is a right for a defendant to not be retried on crimes for which they were already acquitted — to be tossed to Norfolk County Superior Court Judge Beverly J. Cannone, who was the trial judge, who denied the claim. Then the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court upheld Cannone’s ruling. Then Boston-based federal court Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV denied the defense’s request for habeas corpus. This current matter is an appeal of Saylor’s ruling.
The latest filing states that the U.S. Supreme Court noted in the 1977 case Abney v. United States that “the rights conferred on a criminal accused by the Double Jeopardy Clause would be significantly undermined if appellate review of the double jeopardy claims were postponed until after conviction and sentence … It is a guarantee against being twice put on trial for the same offense.”
The filing says that prosecutors agree to a continuance of the trial to the end of April 2025, but that the prosecution “reserves the right to oppose any further continuance or delay of the trial, including if the First Circuit appeal has not been resolved by the time of the new trial date.”