Opening Arguments for the Trial Everyone Is Talking About Begins Tuesday

Yahoo

22-04-2025

Los Angeles defense attorney Alan Jackson is expected to give a fiery opening argument Tuesday morning in the case of Karen Read, the one-time Massachusetts finance analyst charged with backing her SUV while drunk into her Boston police officer boyfriend during a 2022 blizzard. Jackson, along with fellow L.A. defense attorney Elizabeth Little, have maintained that John O'Keefe, a well-respected Boston cop whose body was found in a snowbank after a night of partying with Read and other law enforcement officers in the early morning hours of Jan. 29, 2002, was brutalized inside the Canton, Mass. home of Brian Albert, a now retired Boston police officer, a charge he and others assembled at the home steadfastly deny. This is Read's second trial. The first ended with a hung jury - with one of those jurors, a Boston lawyer, now working for Read's defense. Victoria Brophey George, a Princeton-educated lawyer from Boston who was an alternate when fellow jurors led the judge to declare a mistrial, will now be sitting with Read's high-profile Angeleno attorneys and hard-hitting former Boston city prosecutor, David Yanetti.Jury selection in the case ended on April 15, after three weeks of voir dire. Eighteen people were selected to serve in the case, and after closing arguments, 12 will be selected to deliberate while the others will remain on as alternates.
Read, 45, has been working on her defense full-time since her arrest on second-degree murder and other charges within hours of her boyfriend's body being found. She is now millions of dollars in debt she says in an HBO documentary, and "fighting for her life." The prosecution also has a new lead attorney, one added to the team from the private sector: Hank Brennan, a criminal defense lawyer who famously defended notorious Boston Irish mobster James "Whitey" Bulger, who was captured in Santa Monica in June 2011 after more than a decade on the lam, and murdered by a coterie of his enemies at a federal prison seven years later. From the time Read was taken into custody, the case exposed a myriad of problems in the investigation at the hands of Massachusetts State Police troopers who are assigned to the Norfolk County District Attorney's Office, currently run by Michael Morrissey. The troopers assigned to that unit investigate homicides alongside their local police counterparts Norfolk County, which is comprised of 27 insular cities and towns that make up what is known locally as the south shore of Boston. But retired Massachusetts State Police Lieutenant Bob Long, who now runs a vaunted private investigations agency, defended the work of his former colleagues in the state police, pointing to the blizzard conditions and the emotions at play when a fellow cop "is left to die." "She admitted at the crime scene that she thinks she hit him," Long told Los Angeles. "They were working from that premise in blizzard conditions." This story is developing. Stay up to date with developments at lamag.com