Supreme Court denies request to halt Karen Read murder retrial as jury selection nears end
The U.S. Supreme Court on April 9 denied Karen Read's emergency request to delay her retrial for the murder of her boyfriend, a Boston police officer, in 2022.
Read filed a petition on April 1 asking the nation's highest court for a stay of her retrial, which is nearing the end of jury selection, while she waits to see if the court will overturn two charges against her on double jeopardy grounds. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson denied the request.
Read asked to pause the retrial the same day she filed a petition with the court asking the justices to throw out charges of second-degree murder and leaving the scene of a collision causing injury or death in connection with the death of John O'Keefe. A response to that petition is due by May 5, according to the Supreme Court's website.
Read, 45, is accused of backing into O'Keefe with her SUV in January 2022 and leaving him for dead in the snow outside a Canton, Massachusetts, home after a night of drinking. Read’s attorneys say that she was framed in a cover-up by local law enforcement officials.
After her first trial ended with a hung jury last year, the state vowed to put Read on trial again. Jury selection in her retrial began on April 1.
Karen Read argues two charges constitute double jeopardy
Read's lawyers say that after the mistrial, jurors told them they'd unanimously agreed to acquit Read of the two charges and only remained divided on a manslaughter charge. Because the jury's impasse "was limited to one of the three counts rather than all," Read should not have to fight those charges again, her attorneys argued.
Under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution, the Double Jeopardy Clause prohibits anyone from being prosecuted twice for substantially the same crime, according to Cornell Law School.
Read's attempts to get the charges thrown out were denied by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit and Norfolk Superior Court Judge Beverly Cannone, who presided over Read's first trial and is also handling her retrial.
Her defense team then filed a writ of certiorari with the Supreme Court, which is a request that the high court order a lower court to "send up the record of the case for review." The Supreme Court agrees to hear about 100 to 150 of the more than 7,000 cases that it is asked to review each year.
Read's attempts to delay her retrial while her motion to dismiss the charges makes its way through the court system were also denied by Cannone, a federal judge and finally, Jackson.