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USA Today
23-04-2025
- USA Today
Who is Judge Beverly Cannone? What to know about judge in Karen Read trial
Who is Judge Beverly Cannone? What to know about judge in Karen Read trial Show Caption Hide Caption John O'Keefe's family files wrongful death lawsuit against Karen Read A wrongful death lawsuit filed by the family of Boston police officer John O'Keefe accuses Karen Read of knowingly hitting O'Keefe with her SUV and leaving him to die. Scripps News The South Shore is back in the national spotlight as Karen Read's second trial begins this week. Read is accused of killing her boyfriend, Boston police officer John O'Keefe, with her SUV outside a Canton home in 2022. The case sparked a media frenzy during Read's first trial last year, which ended in a hung jury. At the center of the trial is Superior Court Judge Beverly J. Cannone, who also presided over last year's proceedings. A longtime judge for Massachusetts' Superior Court, Cannone is a South Shore native who was once a public defender. Here's what to know about her. Judge Beverly Cannone grew up and still lives on the South Shore Cannone grew up in Quincy and lives in Norwell. According to a 2009 Patriot Ledger article, Cannone's father, the late John Prescott, was a Norfolk County prosecutor in the early 1970s and later a public defender who ran the Boston office of the Massachusetts Defenders Committee. She is one of six children and her mother, the late Gertrude Prescott, worked in the Quincy Public School system, according to an obituary published in The Patriot Ledger. Where did Judge Beverly Cannone go to college? A graduate of the University of Massachusetts, Cannone earned a bachelor's degree from the school in 1982, according to her profile on Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly. She went on to earn a juris doctorate degree from the New England School of Law in 1985. After graduating from law school, Cannone was a public defender for 25 years in Middlesex, Plymouth and Norfolk counties. Gov. Deval Patrick nominated Beverly Cannone to District and Superior Court After 25 years as a criminal defense lawyer, former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick nominated Cannone to Quincy District Court in 2009. Five years later in 2014, Patrick nominated Cannone to Superior Court. Cannone has presided over some of the South Shore's most high-profile cases, including the trial of Emanuel Lopes, who was convicted of killing Weymouth police officer Michael Chesna. Read's defense team asked Cannone to recuse herself Back in 2023, Read's defense team asked Cannone to recuse herself from the case, citing concerns about her "ability to maintain fairness." She denied the request. Online speculation circulated at the time that Cannone may have had personal connections to some of the witnesses, but she said the claims were untrue. Read's lawyer Alan Jackson also alleged at the time that Cannone routinely failed to act on defense motions in a timely manner. Melina Khan is a trending reporter for the USA TODAY Network - New England, which serves more than a dozen affiliated publications across New England. She can be reached at MKhan@
Boston Globe
12-03-2025
- Politics
- Boston Globe
Saints preserve us
There, Mayor Thomas P. Koch has decreed that the city's massively expensive new public safety building will be adorned with two 10-foot-tall statues of saints venerated in his deeply-held Catholic faith. The effigies will be heroic, and ripped. They will also cost taxpayers $850,000. One will depict St. Florian, patron saint of firefighters, a caped colossus dousing the flames. The other huge figure will be a winged and muscular St. Michael, patron saint of police officers, with his foot on the neck of a horned figure in his death throes. According to statements by his chief of staff adornments all by himself. He certainly didn't tell anybody else, it appears, given that everybody in the city only found out about them after the Patriot Ledger How wrong is all of this? Where to start? Advertisement Maybe with the poor, battered federal Constitution, which, like our state's, mandates that the government must not promote any religion. 'Having two larger-than-life statues of Catholic saints, or any primarily religious figure, is the type of endorsement of religion that our state and federal constitutions prohibit,' said Rachel Davidson, a staff attorney and First Amendment specialist at the ACLU of Massachusetts, which In a statement, the city said the mayor disagrees with the ACLU's characterization of the statues. 'As we've stated all along, the figures transcend religion and have a deep, long-held symbolic meaning of protection for our first responders,' it continued. 'This is about them.' Is it, though? It's one thing for a police officer to choose to carry around a medal that her faith says will offer divine protection. It's entirely another to erect two giant effigies outside a public building that will be used by people of all faiths, or of no faith at all. Advertisement And then there is the design of the statue of St. Michael itself — a warrior standing over a demon-like figure, stepping on his neck. Tone-deaf doesn't even begin to describe the wrongness of that image in the wake of George Floyd's 2020 murder by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, who knelt on Floyd's neck for so long he died. City Councilor Dan Minton, a former member of the police force who served Quincy for decades, has called the image 'violent.' 'I don't want citizens to connect this statue with the way our Officers treat anyone,' Minton But good luck getting Koch to change his mind on this. The city's longest-serving mayor is rarely budged by public opposition. There was a notable exception last year, when he got himself a 79 percent pay raise, which would have boosted his salary from $150,000 to $285,000. After residents gathered more than 6,000 signatures for a recall petition he did agree A 'The fact that he believes he can authorize the enormous expense of these big, bombastic bronzes, with no discussion with the citizens or the City Council, that is offensive,' said Claire Fitzmaurice, who organized the petition. When a city councilor asked Koch's chief of staff what those who oppose the statues should do, he essentially told them to go pound sand. 'Wait for the beautiful public artwork to appear on these buildings and enjoy it with the rest of the public,' advised Chris Walker. 'The decision has been made.' Advertisement Does that kind of dismissive rhetoric remind you of anybody? Look, what we're seeing in Washington is a generational disaster, a constitutional crisis so monumental it's hard to see how we get out of it. But that doesn't mean we have to let this kind of anti-constitutional attitude creep into our local governments. We have to hold the line. Globe columnist Yvonne Abraham can be reached at
