The Karen Read Trial Just Took a Wild Turn
The jury did not reach a verdict Monday on its first full day of deliberations in the second murder trial of Karen Read, who is charged with killing her Boston police officer boyfriend in a case that has generated more than three years of heated debate.
Jurors began deliberations late last week, more than a month after the trial started.
Read, 45, is accused of striking John O’Keefe with her car outside a suburban Boston house party and leaving him to die in the snow in January 2022. She has been charged with second-degree murder, manslaughter and leaving the scene.
Read's lawyers say O’Keefe, 46, was beaten, bitten by a dog, then left outside a home in Canton in a conspiracy orchestrated by the police that included planting evidence against Read.
Read's second trial followed similar contours to the first, which ended in a mistrial last year.
Read has never been jailed for O'Keefe's killing. She did not testify at her first murder trial or this one.
Defense argues Read was framed
Defense attorney Alan Jackson began his closing argument Friday by repeating three times: “There was no collision.” He told the jury that Read is an innocent woman victimized by a police cover up in which law enforcement officers sought to protect their own and obscure the real killer.
He repeatedly attacked the lead investigator in the case, former Massachusetts State Trooper Michael Proctor, who was fired after sharing offensive and sexist texts about Read with friends, family and co-workers. He said Proctor's “blatant bias” tainted every aspect of the corrupt and flawed investigation and noted how prosecutors refused to put him on the stand, as they did during the first trial.
Proctor, he said, ignored leads, planted evidence and failed to consider anyone other than Read as a potential suspect.
“Michael Proctor went far beyond just insulting Karen Read. He dehumanized this woman,” he told jurors. “He betrayed her as a human being. He was fired for this blatant bias. If the Massachusetts State Police can't trust him, how can you trust him with this investigation, with your verdict and with Karen Read’s life?”
Jackson was limited in this trial to arguing that someone other than Read killed O'Keefe. Rather than suggesting as many as three people could have killed O'Keefe as he did during the first trial, Jackson singled out Brian Higgins, a federal agent who worked in Canton and had exchanged flirtatious texts with Read. Jackson suggested Higgins was agitated at a bar after Read didn’t respond to his text and had coaxed O’Keefe over to the Canton house party where he was beaten up.
Post a Comment