The retrial of Karen Read, who is accused of hitting her boyfriend with her car and leaving him to die on a snowy night in 2022, begins Tuesday in Dedham, Massachusetts.
Read's first trial resulted in a deadlocked jury and a mistrial. The case and the trial were documented in the Netflix series A Body in the Snow: The Trial of Karen Read. The second trial begins with opening statements as Read again faces charges of second-degree murder, manslaughter, operating a vehicle under the influence and leaving the scene, the Associated Press detailed.
Read's boyfriend, Boston police officer John O'Keefe died on the front lawn of a home where he had gone to attend a party. Read had been driving and dropped O'Keefe off at fellow police officer Brian Albert's home.
Prosecutors contend that O'Keefe never made it inside and that Read ran him down, while her defense team has said she's the victim of a police conspiracy to frame her.
The case has been marked by controversy and crossed accusations, and further complicated by the firing of Massachusetts State Trooper Michael Proctor after an internal investigation into his conduct, Fox News recalled. Proctor had sent derogatory texts about Read early in the investigation which the defense argued demonstrated his bias toward her at the outset of the investigation.
"Now that Proctor's been fired, the prosecution can own these bad facts and get ahead of them," former federal prosecutor Neama Rahmani told Fox News. "By 'fronting' the unprofessional and embarrassing evidence impeaching Proctor for the jury, and showing Proctor has been terminated for his misconduct, the commonwealth will have a better chance of securing a conviction this time."
Legal experts told Fox News Digital that retrials can often benefit the prosecution, which knows what to expect from witnesses.
"I think she faces a major uphill climb," Andrew Stoltmann, a Chicago-based attorney and adjunct professor at Northwestern University's School of Law, told the outlet. "They have many witnesses locked into their story. As for a prediction, I say the prosecutors are going to win this case as they are going to be loaded for bear with respect to her expert witnesses."
