Karen Read murder case still 4 jurors short of ready for trial

BOSTON — Attorneys on Thursday selected two more in the third batch of potential jurors in the white-hot Karen Read murder case at Norfolk Superior Court, but didn’t get enough for trial and will have to interview at least one more batch.

Jury selection began Tuesday in Norfolk Superior Court in Dedham with more than 90 candidates. Attorneys selected four that day and seven the next day from a similarly sized pool. Apparently they lost one from Wednesday due to unspecified reasons, so the two new jurors selected Thursday from a much smaller pool of 57 brought the total to 12, four short of the 16 jurors needed for the trial to begin.

The case will take Friday off and resume with a new jury pool on Monday. The court clerk’s office said that opening arguments will not be heard on the same day, so the earliest the trial will actually begin is Tuesday.

Read, 44, of Mansfield, was indicted in June of 2022 for second-degree murder, motor vehicle manslaughter, and leaving the scene of a collision causing death in the Jan. 29, 2022, death of John O’Keefe, 46, a 16-year member of the Boston Police Department and Read’s boyfriend of two years. Prosecutors say she struck him with her Lexus SUV outside a Canton home after a night of heavy drinking and left him to die in the cold.

The case has amassed not only significant local attention and a rabidly vocal local following, but also national press attention. The case is so hot that Judge Beverly Cannone ordered a 200-foot buffer zone to keep any demonstrators from influencing jurors, a decision which was contested on First Amendment grounds.

The notoriety of the case is reflected in the juror questionnaire, which was released Wednesday, wherein three of the 29 questions directly ask potential jurors about the media coverage and another indirectly alludes to it by asking, “Have you already started to make up your mind about this case?”

It’s a significant question. During the three days of jury selection, a vast majority of potential jurors responded during general questioning that they had at least heard of or even discussed the Read case.

Of the 57 present on Tuesday, 41 said they had heard or discussed the case. Of them, a further 20 said they had developed an opinion and eight of those said they believed they were biased in the case one way or another.

Jurors were sworn in at 9:50 a.m. Thursday following a delay that Cannone attributed to checking with the Dedham District Court across the street to see if they would need part of the jury pool. They did not, so the Superior Court received the full pool.

The day began with Cannone calling the attorneys to a roughly two-minute sidebar to discuss an unspecified “issue.”

Ahead of the hearing, the prosecution filed two notices of evidence discovery. Six police reports, all from the Massachusetts State Police, were filed as evidence, as was a three-page mitochondrial DNA report from BODE Technologies, which presumably has to do with the hair police say they found on the passenger-side rear taillight of Read’s SUV. None of those documents were available for public review.

The DNA test remained a pending issue and a source of contention as the trial schedule was finalized. Cannone had not ruled by the jury selection stage whether to admit the evidence, and it is not clear if she intends to rule on it before the trial begins in earnest next week.

Before the end of the court day, the prosecution filed a motion to “Admit Results of Defendant’s Blood Draw at Good Samaritan Hospital and Resulting Serum Conversion and Retrograde Extrapolation.” The defense has contested whether those alcohol tests are accurate based on the time of their administration.

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