Karen Read appeals 2 of her charges up to the U.S. Supreme Court
Karen Read, who is accused of killing her boyfriend in Massachusetts in 2022, has appealed her case to the highest court possible, the U.S. Supreme Court.
Read, whose retrial is currently in jury selection in Norfolk Superior Court, is asking the country's highest court to drop two of her three charges.
Read and her lawyers claim that double jeopardy - the constitutional concept that citizens should not be tried twice for a crime for which they were acquitted - should prevent her from being retried on two of her three charges.
Specifically, Read wants the Supreme Court to drop the murder and leaving the scene charges, leaving only manslaughter remaining.
The argument is based on claims that jurors in her first trial agreed unanimously behind closed doors to acquit her on those two charges, an acquittal they never revealed in open court before the trial ended in a mistrial due to a hung jury.
Supreme Court questions
Read is asking the Supreme Court to decide two questions:
1. Whether a final and unanimous, but unannounced, decision by a jury following trial that the prosecution failed to prove a defendant guilty of a charged offense constitutes an acquittal precluding retrial under the Double Jeopardy Clause.
2. Whether a defendant who produces credible evidence of such a final, unanimous, and unannounced acquittal is entitled to a post-trial hearing to substantiate the fact of such acquittal.
Prior appeals denied
Read has made similar appeals to the state's highest court, the Supreme Judicial Court. She then appealed to the federal U.S. District Court, which denied her appeal. A subsequent appeal to the First Circuit Court of Appeals was also denied.
The Supreme Court is the final step for this appeal.
The appeal is called a writ of certiorari, the formal term for appeals to the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court, which consists of nine members, gets to decide which cases it takes. It receives thousands of writs of certiorari each year.
WBZ Legal Analyst Katherine Loftus says the Supreme Court is unlikely to take the case.
"I think the case law is so clear that they're likely to deny the request for it to even be heard," Loftus said. "And if they were in theory to hear the case, I think it would likely be the same result."
If the Court denies a writ of certiorari, the decision of the lower court stands, and the case ends.
Charges against Karen Read
Read, 44, is accused of hitting and killing her boyfriend, Boston Police Officer John O'Keefe, with her SUV after a night of heavy drinking and leaving him to die in the snow outside a Canton home in January 2022.
She has pleaded not guilty to second-degree murder, manslaughter while operating under the influence of alcohol, and leaving the scene of personal injury and death.
Her first trial ended in July last year with a mistrial due to a hung jury. The retrial is taking place in Norfolk Superior Court.
