Does a Karen Read retrial benefit the prosecution or the defense? Northeastern expert explains
Roughly 10 months after her first murder trial ended in a hung jury, Karen Read is back in Norfolk County Superior Court for a retrial.
Read has once again pleaded not guilty to charges of second-degree murder, motor vehicle manslaughter while driving under the influence, and leaving the scene of a collision causing injury and death.
Prosecutors allege that Read was drunk when she struck her boyfriend, Boston police officer John O’Keefe, with her SUV while dropping him off at a home in Canton, Massachusetts, on Jan. 29, 2022, following a night out with friends.
Read’s lawyers say, however, that someone else killed O’Keefe during a party at a fellow officer’s home and that Read has been framed in a widespread conspiracy among law enforcement, the homeowners and fellow afterparty guests.
Northeastern Global News spoke with Daniel Medwed, a university distinguished professor of law and criminal justice, about how the retrial may differ from the first murder trial;
whether the prosecution or defense may have the upper hand; and the potential impact of publicity surrounding the case.
Comments have been edited for brevity and clarity.
What does a retrial mean for the prosecution and for the defense? Does one side have the upper hand?
One school of thought suggests that a retrial favors the prosecution because the prosecution has a sense of what the defense’s theory and strategy will be. The prosecution also has this terrific special prosecutor now, Hank Brennan, to essentially scrutinize what the defense did and develop a prosecution case that anticipates some of the defense arguments. The prosecution has the benefit of having had a sort of trial run, so to speak — pardon the pun.
The other school of thought with respect to this particular case is that one benefit that the defense has that it didn’t have during the first trial is all of the revelations about Michael Proctor, the state police officer who headed up the investigation and was essentially fired as a result of his indiscretions in the case.
Will the intense media coverage of the case — from Netflix to a local blogger — have an impact on the retrial?
Once a case is really covered by the media, it means that the jury pool has accessed information that it wouldn’t necessarily have in a run-of-the-mill case. So, the goal is not to find a jury that has never heard of the case because, essentially, you’d have to be living under a rock in Massachusetts not to have heard of the Karen Read case. So you don’t want people who’ve been living under a rock. You want people who are participants in society, but who can put aside whatever they’ve read or heard.
But what makes this case especially interesting is not only all the media attention, but also the sort of pop culture phenomenon it has become.
So, I think it’ll mean that, despite what jurors will say and what they said during jury selection — that they can keep an open mind — there might be some serious questions about whether everyone on the jury truly can keep an open mind, given how polarizing this case is and how much coverage it’s had.
Why has it attracted so much attention?
Gender is a part of it. When women are accused of crimes, there’s often more attention because it’s relatively unusual. The killing of a police officer is also relatively unusual.
And then you add some of the problems with the investigation that provide fodder to people to speculate about possible conspiracies at a time where there’s a well-known distrust of everything and a distrust of what is a fact and what isn’t. You put it together, it just creates a pretty spicy stew.
So, since this is a retrial, is there anything actually new about the case?
I don’t see any sort of new bombshells.
One difference is they know about Michael Proctor.
Another difference is a change in the composition of the teams — swapping out the lead prosecutor for Hank Brennan. And one of the jurors from the first trial was a lawyer and is now on the defense team — that’s a weird twist.
The judge also limited the scope of what the defense can do in pointing the finger at other suspects — that’s a blow to the defense case, but not a knockout blow because they can still develop a theory that someone else did it.
The final thing that’s different is Karen Read has made public statements since the trial. Under the rules of evidence, those public statements — any statement that the prosecution learns about whether it was a public or private statement, in fact — are not treated as hearsay and so are admissible.
But the gist is really the same.
So does the strategy for either the defense or prosecution change?
The defense is going to talk about Michael Proctor as much as possible — what he didn’t do; what he did do, and his appalling statements about the defendant. They’re going to try to bring that into the case while the prosecution is going to try to point to independent evidence or independent experts to suggest that, regardless of Proctor’s involvement, this is still a case of guilt.
I think one glitch in the first trial was that the prosecution was advancing two different theories — one that Read intended to kill O’Keefe because they were in an acrimonious relationship; and the other was that she was drunk and it was purely reckless.
I’m sort of curious to see the extent to which the prosecution leans into both or one or the other.
Anything else?
What’s interesting about the case is its very much a 21st-century case, where there are a lot of armchair detectives and a lot of people who seem to have a lot of information about the case, and there is the sense that the line between what’s admissible in court and what’s the rumor mill is increasingly murky. On social media, you’ll hear about very specific details regarding various players in the case, for instance, and I’m watching to see whether any of those details actually appear in court.
It’s being litigated in the court of public opinion and in the courtroom in real time, and it’s pretty astonishing to watch it unfold.