Massachusetts Supreme Court will hear arguments in favor of Karen Reed to drop murder charges

BOSTON — The latest chapter in the Karen Reed saga heads to the state’s highest court, where her lawyers hope to convince judges Wednesday that several charges related to the death of her boyfriend, a Boston police officer, should be dismissed.

Reed is accused of crashing into John O’Keefe with her SUV and leaving him for dead during a snowstorm in January 2022. Reed’s lawyers argue that she was framed and that other law enforcement officers were responsible for O’Keefe’s death. In June, the judge declared a mistrial after finding the jury could not reach an agreement. A retrial on the same charges is scheduled to begin in January, although on Monday both sides asked for it to be delayed until April. 1.

The defense is expected to repeat arguments made in briefs to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court that retrying Reed on charges of second-degree murder and leaving the scene of an accident would be an unconstitutional double jeopardy.

Defense lawyers said that after her mistrial, five jurors said they were deadlocked on only the manslaughter charge and agreed she was not guilty on the remaining charges. But they didn’t tell the judge anything.

The defense also argues that the jury’s affidavit “reflects a clear and unequivocal determination of Ms. Reed’s innocence” and supports their request for an evidentiary hearing on whether the jury found her not guilty of the two charges.

Reed’s lawyers cited the ruling in the case of Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, in which a federal appeals court earlier this year ordered the judge overseeing his trial to investigate defense allegations of jury bias and determine whether his death sentence should be upheld.

“By the Commonwealth’s logic, no defendant who asserts that the jury acquitted her but fails to declare that verdict will be entitled to further inquiry, no matter how clear and well-supported her allegations are,” the defense said.

The defense also argues that the judge suddenly declared a mistrial at trial without first asking each juror to affirm their findings on each count.

“There is no indication that the court considered any alternatives, primarily an investigation into partial sentences,” the defense said in a statement. “And the lawyer was not given a full opportunity to be heard. The court never asked the lawyer’s opinion or even mentioned the word “mistrial.”

In August, a judge ruled that Reed could be retried on those charges. “If there is no verdict in open court here, the defendant’s retrial does not violate the principle of double jeopardy,” Judge Beverly Cannon said in her ruling.

In their appeal to the court, prosecutors wrote that there were no grounds to dismiss the charges of second-degree murder and fleeing the scene.

In a statement, they noted that the jury said the case was deadlocked three times before it was declared a mistrial. Prosecutors said “the defendant was given a reasonable opportunity to be heard on any proposed alternative.”

“The defendant was not acquitted of any charge because the jury did not return, announce or confirm any open and public verdicts of not guilty,” they wrote. “This requirement is not a mere formalism, a ministerial act or an empty formality. This is a fundamental guarantee that ensures that a juror’s position will not be erroneous, distorted or imposed by other jurors.”

Prosecutors said Reed, a former Bentley College adjunct professor, and O’Keefe, a 16-year Boston police officer, had been drinking heavily before she dropped him off at a party at the home of Brian Albert, a Boston colleague. . They said she hit him with her SUV before driving away. An autopsy determined O’Keefe died from hypothermia and blunt force trauma.

The defense portrayed Reed as the victim, saying O’Keefe was actually killed at Albert’s home and then dragged outside. They argued that investigators focused on Reed because she was a “convenient outsider” who spared them the need to consider law enforcement officers as suspects.