Karen Read murder case: Federal appeal denied, retrial to proceed

Flint McColgan, Boston Herald on Mar 27, 2025

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BOSTON — Karen Read’s federal appeal was denied and her state retrial can proceed with all three charges, including murder, intact.

“The district court’s decision is affirmed,” Judge Lara E. Montecalvo wrote in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit’s decision issued Thursday afternoon. “Read’s motion to stay the state court proceedings pending appeal is denied as moot.”

The 22-page decision was the Read defense team’s latest in a series of losses to dismiss her case or at least delay the retrial scheduled to begin Tuesday at Norfolk Superior Court in Dedham.

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. She was tried last year, but that ended in mistrial.

Shortly after the July 1, 2024, mistrial, the defense team said that members of the trial jury had come forward to say that the jury, despite three increasingly assertive notes indicating an impasse, was only hung on the manslaughter charge and was ready to acquit on the other two charges, including manslaughter, but did not know they could return a partial verdict.

This, the defense team says, means that to retry Read on the two charges the jury would have acquitted her on would be a violation of her constitutional protections from double jeopardy — or being tried again on the same charges after being found innocent.

The argument failed first before the trial judge, Beverly J. Cannone, who will preside over the retrial as well. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court then upheld Cannone’s ruling. The defense then went to the federal district court in Boston for a habeas corpus argument — they wanted the federal courts to free Read of unjust prosecution, based on the double jeopardy argument.

U.S. District Court Chief Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV denied the Read argument. On Thursday, the 1st Circuit backed up his decision.

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