The Supreme Court has declined to halt Karen Read's second trial. The court rejected her double jeopardy appeal on Monday, meaning her retrial, now in its second week, will continue, ABC News reports. Her trial last year on charges of second-degree murder, leaving the scene of a crash, and manslaughter ended in a mistrial. Her lawyers argued that jurors had unanimously agreed that she was not guilty on the first two charges but did not inform the judge they were only deadlocked on the manslaughter charge. The court did not ask the prosecution to respond to the appeal, which the AP sees as "a sign the justices did not think there was a difficult legal issue at stake."
CBS News reports that Read asked the country's top court to decide two questions about the case:
- Whether a final and unanimous, but unannounced, decision by a jury following trial that the prosecution failed to prove a defendant guilty of a charged offense constitutes an acquittal precluding retrial under the Double Jeopardy Clause.
- Whether a defendant who produces credible evidence of such a final, unanimous, and unannounced acquittal is entitled to a post-trial hearing to substantiate the fact of such acquittal.
Earlier this month, the Supreme Court declined an emergency request from Read's lawyers to postpone the trial until it could review the appeal. Read is accused of killing her boyfriend, Boston police officer John O'Keefe, by hitting him with her SUV outside a fellow officer's home in January 2022 and leaving him to die in a blizzard. Defense lawyers argue she was framed after O'Keefe died at a party at the other officer's home. (More Karen Read stories.)
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