The selection of the jury begins in the new trial of Karen Read on the death of the boyfriend’s police

By Michael Casey, Associated Press

The selection of the jury began on Tuesday in the new expected trial of Karen Read, less than a year after a judge declared a trial for being responsible for the death of his Boston police friend.

Reading, from Mansfield, is accused of having struck his boyfriend, Boston police officer John O’Keefe, with his SUV and letting him die in a snowstorm outside a party at home in the city of Canton. His lawyers said that O’Keefe had been killed by someone else, perhaps another agent responsible for the application of the laws that was celebrating and that she was framed.

Last year, the judge declared a trial after the jurors declared that they were an impasse and that the deliberation more would be futile.

After the trial, several jurors came forward to say that the group was unanimous to find that the reading not guilty of the most serious accusation, the second degree murder and a lesser accusation. Despite the attempts by Read’s lawyers to have these accusations reject, she will face the same charges as during her first trial. They were also not launched in the whole case, arguing a government fault.

A rocky relationship becomes fatal

Read, who worked as a financial analyst and auxiliary professor Bentley College before being charged, faces a second degree murder and other accusations in the death of John O’Keefe, who was 46 years old at his death. The 16 -year -old police veteran was found insensitive outside the home of another Boston police officer.

After a drinking evening, the prosecutors say that Read, who is 45 years old, deposited O’Keefe at the party of the house just after midnight. As she made a three -point turn, say the prosecutors, she hit O’Keefe before leaving. She returned a few hours later to find him in a snow bank.

As they did during the first trial, prosecutors will try to convince the jurors that Read’s actions were intentional. We expect what they call witnesses who will describe how the relationship of the couple had started to turn before the death of O’Keefe. Among them, his brother, who testified during the first trial, that the couple regularly disputed on questions such as what read the children of O’Keefe, and that he witnessed a fight in 2021 that the couple had Cape Cod on the way in which his brother treated it. The brother’s wife testified that Read had told him that the couple had fought in Aruba after caught O’Keefe kissing another woman.

Defense blame a third for the death of O’Keefe

The defense should portray the investigation into O’Keefe’s death as of poor quality and compromised by the close relations of investigators with the police and other law enforcement agents who were at home.

Among the main witnesses they call is the former state soldier Michael Proctor, who has conducted the investigation but has since been dismissed after a disciplinary council discovered that he sent sexist and rude SMS on Read to his family and colleagues. He is also part of the list of witnesses of the accusation.

A key moment in the first trial was the testimony of Proctor, in which the defense suggested its texts on Read and the case showed that it was biased, and distinguished it at the start of the investigation and ignored other potential suspects.

They should also suggest that Read was supervised, saying that O’Keefe was killed inside the house during a fight with another revelers, then dragged outside. During the first trial, the defense lawyers suggested that investigators focused on Read because it was a “practical foreign” which saved them from having to consider agents of the application of laws as suspects.

Before the second trial, the two parties clashed if the Read lawyers will be allowed to say that someone else killed O’Keefe. Judge Beverly Cannone judged on Monday that lawyers cannot mention potential third -party culprits in their opening declarations, but will be allowed to develop evidence against Brian Albert, a retired police officer who had the Canton home and his friend Brian Higgins. Lawyers cannot involve Albert’s nephew, Colin Albert, said the judge.

Double danger argument of defense fails

Shortly after the trial, Read lawyers decided to drop the main charges.

They argued that Cannone had declared a trial without questioning the jurors to confirm their conclusions. Defense lawyer Martin Weinberg said that five jurors indicated after the trial they had only been presented in the countless homicide and had not unanimously agreed that it was not guilty of second degree and leaving murder, but that they had not said to the judge.

The defense said that because the jurors had agreed that reading was not guilty of murder and leaving the premises, trying it again on these charges would be equivalent to double danger. But Cannone rejected this argument, as is the highest court of the State and a judge of the Federal Court. Defense lawyers have since appealed the federal decision.

Prosecutors had urged Cannone to reject the request for double incrimination, claiming that this was equivalent to “hearsay, conjecture and legally inappropriate dependence on the substance of the deliberations of the jury”. Deputy Prosecutor Adam Lally argued that the jurors had never indicated that they had returned a verdict on any of the accusations, received clear instructions on how to return a verdict and that the defense had the opportunity to oppose the declaration at trial.

A new prosecutor

The second try will probably look like the first. He will be held in the same courthouse before the same judge, and dozens of supporters passionate about Read should again rally outside. The accusations, primary defense lawyers and many of the nearly 200 witnesses will also be the same.

The biggest difference will be the main prosecutor, Hank Brennan. A former prosecutor and defense lawyer who was brought as a special prosecutor after the Mistrial, Brennan represented a certain number of eminent customers, including the notorious gangster of Boston James “Whitey” Bulger, and the experts think that it could be more energetic than Lally was only the case.

Originally published: April 1, 2025 at 7:32 PDT