“My job is to follow legal stories in the news,” an MSNBC legal analyst wrote. He continued here, “Apparently, I’m not so great at my job. A month ago, when a non-journalist friend messaged me to ask about my thoughts on the Karen Read murder trial, my response was: ‘Who’s Karen Read?’”
I’m not very far ahead of him; I’ve seen her name in headlines, and know it’s a murder trial involving cops, but that’s it. I didn’t delve into the story for posting on this blog. It’s too tabloid, and there didn’t seem to be a point to make.
The MSNBC guy filled me in: “Karen Read is a 44-year-old finance professor in Massachusetts accused of intentionally backing her Lexus SUV into her boyfriend, John O’Keefe, a Boston police officer, and leaving him to die, unconscious outside a house party in a blizzard.”
Her car has dents, cops had evidence she was driving drunk, “expletive-laced voicemails from Read to the victim’s phone, and what seemed to be voluntary admissions by the defendant that she had hit the victim.” (She screamed, “Oh my God, I hit him!” at the scene.)
Open and shut case? Read’s lawyers argue she dropped him off at a party, where he got into a fight, then was thrown into the front yard by partygoers. Followed by “lazy” and “sloppy” police work that pinned his death on her.
Sound like a stretch? Yeah, but plausible, although it doesn’t explain the dents or defendant’s statements. The MSNBC analyst, who’s a criminal defense lawyer, doesn’t think she’s innocent, but does think her lawyers created enough reasonable doubt that he’d acquit her. That seems thin to me.
Defendants, of course, don’t have to prove innocence. They don’t have to prove anything, but unless the prosecution case is very weak, it’s in a defendant’s interest to refute the prosecutor’s accusations or at least create doubt in jurors’ minds.
The jury is deliberating, hasn’t reached a verdict, but my guess is they’ll convict her. And whatever happens, this is still a tabloid story.
Photo above: Would you ride in a car with this woman?