Karen Reed’s second murder trial begins with a new ju judge
Karen Reed began her second trial last year after being charged with the 2022 death of Boston police officer John O’Keefe.
Karen Reid’s fate is now in the hands of a Massachusetts ju apprentice.
Prosecutors and defense attorneys held a sober closing argument on Friday as they ended an eight-week criminal case in the second murder trial on the death of Boston police officer boyfriend John O’Keefe.
The judge rejected the ju appellant for deliberation at about 2:40pm.
“Do you have any questions?” Alan Jackson, one of Reed’s lawyers, asked them in a final message. If their confidence in the case regarding the reading is not “unshakable,” he said the ju-describer must be acquitted if they leave no room for doubt.
Prosecutor Hank Brennan leaned against the phone and vehicle evidence he presented in his last few words and told the ju judge that “data doesn’t lie.” He added: “The timeline in this case is beyond controversy.”
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Reed, 45, has been accused of hitting O’Keefe for dying in the snow on the grass of a friend’s house after the couple became arguing on the heavy drinking night in January 2022.
The defense said Reid dropped O’Keefe off at the home of his friend and fellow Boston police officer Brian Albert, and never saw him again. Police allegedly biased reading from the start and did not investigate any evidence suggesting that other potential suspects were responsible for O’Keefe’s death.
Currently, the 12-person panel will review the evidence presented by lawyers and witness testimony over the past eight weeks. They decide whether the reading is guilty of three charges. It involves killing a second degree, carnal death while drunk, and leaving the scene of the collision leading to death.
The deliberation comes nearly a year when ju judges were unable to rule on the charges against her at Reed’s first trial, resulting in unfair conduct. Since then, the incident has garnered conspiracies from true crime fans around the country, and Read has garnered a large group of supporters who held demonstrations to profess her innocence.
I’ll catch up here on a retry of Read.
The judge rejected the ju appellant for deliberation at about 2:40pm.
The judge began reading the ju judge’s instructions around 1:30pm, explaining the definition of reasonable doubt and saying “all possible doubts must not be exceeded.”
She also explained that the court empireed 18 ju apprentices at the start of the case, but only 12 people were needed for deliberation. She said court officials would randomly select 12 ju judges. The other six will be alternatives.
Prosecutors spent much of the closing discussion outlined Reid’s actions when they realized that O’Keefe had not returned home on January 29, 2022.
Less than 30 minutes after she got home, she left O’Keefe with a voicemail message saying, “No one knows where you are,” Brennan told the ju decree.
The next morning, he said, “I was desperate.” The read was called Jennifer McCabe, one of O’Keefe’s friends and step-sister to Brian Albert, and told her that she had left O’Keefe at the bar the night before, Brennan said. McCabe said he read that he had seen her car outside Albert House the night before, according to previous testimony in the incident.
Brennan then said that the reading called out Kelly Roberts, another of O’Keefe’s friends. This time he insisted, and said that all he had read was that she thought O’Keefe had been “attacked by a plough.”
Brennan suggested that the readings were beginning to cover her tracks at the moment.
“What is causing this extraordinary coercion?” he asked.
He then told the ju judge that he had not proven how the collision between the reader’s car and O’Keefe occurred. However, the data shows that “it happened.”
Brennan concluded his final argument by displaying a photo of O’Keefe to the ju apprentice.
Prosecutor Hank Brennan continued to focus on the data presented in the case early in his final discussion.
The first point of the data, he states: Her blood alcohol level was “approximately 2-3 times the legal limit.”
Another point: Read’s SUV moved 87 feet inverted when O’Keefe’s phone was last locked, according to data from both machines. O’Keefe’s location data lay all night near the flag post outside Albert’s house, and his battery showed a sudden drop in temperature, Brennan said.
He then showed the ju judge an interview clip of the reading material. There, she admits that O’Keefe might have tried to flag her while she was driving, and that she was trying to get that response.
“She didn’t think he was fatally wounded, but she knew he had hit him,” Brennan said.
Brennan laid out the federal incident in three sentences at the beginning of his final argument: “She was drunk. She hit him. And she let him die.”
He read to the ju judges and told him that O’Keefe had a “toxic relationship” and asked him to remember O’Keefe’s testimony from Nie about the family’s vacation in Alba. In the discord, he says that O’Keefe left to be alone and knocked on his door to “have the last word.”
Brennan said he “mirrored” what happened on January 29, 2022.
“The timeline in this case is beyond controversy,” he told the ju referee. “Data is data.”
Defence counsel Alan Jackson begged the ju judge to see the investigators committed in O’Keefe’s case – not treating Albert’s house like a crime scene, including not securing scenes around O’Keefe’s body, nor secured ring cameras for his neighbors across the street.
He reread the text in the thread sent by Massachusetts State Trooper Michael Proctor.
When one of Proctor’s friends asked, “Are homeowners going to catch a lot of shit?” the investigator replied: “No, he’s a Boston cop too.”
Jackson reminded the ju deputies of surveillance video showing Albert “running through the hallway” of the Massachusetts Canton Police Department early on January 29, 2022, before O’Keefe’s body was discovered.
Alberts also sent his dog Chloe to a Vermont farm shortly after O’Keefe’s body was found, Jackson said. The defense suggests that the dog caused a cut in O’Keefe’s arm.
“Who will remove the family pets?” Jackson asked. “Unless they have something to hide.”
“Do you have any questions?” he asked the ju umpire and later said, “Don’t let the Federation run this.”
Jackson walked the ju judges through defence cases from the start, hours before O’Keefe’s death. He pointed out a video showing Albert and another man, Brian Higgins.
Higgins read, “Umm… um… umm… umm,” Jackson said, after meeting O’Keefe and her. Jackson argued that the play’s fight was a practice of attack after O’Keefe.
He said, “annoyed” she hadn’t yet returned home, so Jackson proposed that she arrived home at 12:36am, when she left the increasingly angry voicemail.
He then pointed out forensic evidence and said, “Science is not on his side.”
“No one testified that O’Keefe was attacked by a car, not a single medical expert,” Jackson told the ju umpire, adding that there was no evidence of the impact scene in O’Keefe’s body.
Prosecutors suggest that O’Keefe’s right arm reduction is caused by the broken taillights of Read. However, Jackson wondered how O’Keefe could have received 36 cuts from the taillights if he had only nine punk holes in his sweatshirt.
“There is no evidence,” he repeated, O’Keefe was attacked by the car. “How reasonable is there any doubt?”
“There were no conflicts, there were no conflicts,” Jackson told the ju-degree at the beginning of the discussion, then began to explain how evidence from the case should be considered.
He said they were asked to “glare at injustice” and that it was “the last line of defense between the innocent woman and the system that tried to destroy her.”
If the ju-degrees believed in a federal lawsuit against a true reading “probably” or “probably” then Jackson said he should be acquitted of the reading. To read, he said he needs to have a “unwavering” level of confidence in the prosecutor’s case.
The judge said he intends to hand over the reading case to the ju apprentice by the end of Friday day.
“I’ve finished the fee and don’t want to send it home over the weekend,” Kanon said of giving instructions to the ju referee. “After they’ve been waiting so long, that’s not fair.”
Cannone grants defense and prosecution every 1 hour and 15 minutes to present a closing argument.
After an afternoon lunch break, the judge reads the jury’s instructions. She said she asked the judges to stay until 5pm or 5:30pm for deliberation.
Courttv has been covering cases against reads and criminal investigations since early 2022, when O’Keefe’s body was found outside his Massachusetts home.
You can see Courttv’s live feed of read court proceedings from Norfolk Superior Court in Dedham, Massachusetts. The procedure begins at 9am.
Contributed by: Jessica Trufant, USA Today Network