Karen Learn‘s legal defense team is seeking to push her retrial on murder charges back by more than three weeks to allow time for their federal appeal to toss some parts of the case to be decided.
Delaying the trial date from April 1 to April 25 “is necessary to permit Ms. Read to appeal the denial of her federal Double Jeopardy claims, which the federal district court expressly found to be ‘substantial,’ the Wednesday movement signed by her protection crew states.
Learn’s lawyer’s stated forcing the to begin earlier than a choice by the First Circuit Courtroom of Appeals “would violate her rights.”
The submitting asks for a brand new trial date “on or before April 25.” One other reference within the movement cites April 28 “or the first available date thereafter.” Legal professional David Yannetti clarified to the Herald that the April 25 date was the meant ask.
Learn, 45, of Mansfield is charged with second-degree homicide, manslaughter whereas working a motorcar below the affect, and leaving the scene of an accident inflicting loss of life. She’s accused of killing Boston Police Officer John O’Keefe, her boyfriend of about two years on the time, on Jan. 29, 2022.
This federal enchantment is the newest effort to have her case — or at the least two of the three expenses in opposition to her — tossed after the protection says 5 jurors contacted them after final yr’s mistrial to say they have been solely held on the manslaughter cost and have been able to acquit on the opposite two.
They first took the double jeopardy safety claims — which is a proper for a defendant to not be retried on crimes for which they have been already acquitted — to be tossed to Norfolk County Superior Courtroom Decide Beverly J. Cannone, who was the trial choose, who denied the declare. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Courtroom then upheld Cannone’s ruling. Then Boston-based federal court docket Decide F. Dennis Saylor IV denied the protection’s request for habeas corpus on the double jeopardy declare. This present matter is an enchantment of Saylor’s ruling.
The most recent submitting states that the U.S. Supreme Courtroom famous within the 1977 case Abney v. United States that “the rights conferred on a criminal accused by the Double Jeopardy Clause would be significantly undermined if appellate review of the double jeopardy claims were postponed until after conviction and sentence … It is a guarantee against being twice put on trial for the same offense.”
The submitting says that prosecutors conform to a continuance of the trial to the top of April 2025, however that the prosecution “reserves the right to oppose any further continuance or delay of the trial, including if the First Circuit appeal has not been resolved by the time of the new trial date.”
Learn’s protection additionally launched its witness checklist on Wednesday. That checklist largely displays the identical witnesses within the first trial and contains lead investigator, Trooper Michael Proctor, who was fired by the state police on Wednesday for a sequence of abusive texts he wrote about Learn on the outset of the investigation.
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