BOSTON — The newest member of Karen Read’s defense team is a New York City-based attorney who typically represents businesses in environmental and financial fights and has argued before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Norfolk Superior Court Judge Beverly Cannone has accepted Read’s request for Robert Alessi to be added to her defense team, which attorneys David Yannetti, Alan Jackson and Elizabeth Little have anchored for over two years.

Though his background has focused on “significant energy, environmental and financial services matters,” per his firm DLA Piper, Alessi has also handled many criminal cases over his career, Yannetti told Cannone Tuesday morning.

Yannetti said he and Alessi, who has represented defendants at the appellate and trial levels, had consulted on an undisclosed criminal matter in the past.

“Robert Alessi is one of the top courtroom lawyers in the country,” Yannetti posted on X after a hearing on a slew of motions that Cannone took under advisement. “He will be with us for the re-trial, from start-to-finish, because he believes in Karen’s innocence and has a deep sense of justice.”

Alessi’s profile on his firm’s website lists experiences that include “multiple federal and state court actions arising out of one of the largest bank frauds nationwide” and a “variety of domestic and cross-border criminal matters.

“Many of his trials have turned on the direct examination and cross-examination of experts, where he applies his scientific and technical background,” his profile states.

Jackson, a Los Angeles-based attorney who joined the Read defense team in September 2022, touted in a statement how Alessi’s “experience and skill as a litigator is well known.”

“Karen has received so many gracious offers of assistance from lawyers all over Massachusetts,” Jackson wrote, “and around the country who are disturbed by the corruption revealed during this prosecution, and we remain grateful for that.”

Read owes more than $5 million in deferred legal fees ahead of the anticipated retrial in late January, according to a Vanity Fair article released last month. Prosecutors and the defense are requesting the second trial be delayed until April.

Cannone said Tuesday that she is still weighing her decision on that motion. She also took the prosecution’s request for phone records from Read’s parents, William and Janet, among others, under advisement.

Read, 44, is charged with second-degree murder, manslaughter while operating a motor vehicle under the influence, and leaving the scene of a fatal accident. Her first trial ended with a hung jury in July.

Prosecutors say Read struck John O’Keefe, a 16-year Boston Police officer, and her boyfriend of two years, with her SUV following a drunken argument and left him to die in a snowstorm during the early morning of Jan. 29, 2022, in Canton.

O’Keefe was 46.

Defense attorneys counter that outside actors killed O’Keefe and conspired with state and local police to frame Read for his murder.

Special prosecutor Hank Brennan told Cannone on Tuesday that if she grants access to William and Janet Read’s call, text and data use records between Dec. 30, 2021, to Jan. 30, 2022, they will point to Read’s guilt.

Brennan has said it’s “very likely” that William Read will be called to the stand in the second trial.

“The inference that a 40-something-year-old woman is calling her parents at 1:30 in the morning after this tumultuous event,” Brennan said, “the inference is strong evidence that Ms. Read knew she had done something terrible, she knew she had struck John O’Keefe, and she knew that she had left him behind.”

The defense has called the request for the father and mother’s records a “fishing expedition.”

Read used the phrase when she spoke to reporters outside the courthouse in Dedham after her hearing Tuesday, about Brennan’s request to gain information from local television stations and Boston Magazine.

“Isn’t it amazing that ABC, NBC, Boston Magazine and Fox all sat on alleged confessions and never publicized it?” Read said. “That’s malfeasance on all your parts if that were actually true. That’s a fishing expedition. They don’t exist.”

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