Karen Read wins delay of civil case until after her new murder trial

BOSTON — The civil lawsuit against Karen Read will have to wait until the end of her criminal trial, a Plymouth Superior Court judge ruled.

“[B]ecause this case is in its earliest stages and the criminal case is scheduled to go to retrial in three months, the court will not be inconvenienced by a brief stay, and any scheduling conflict with witnesses that might arise would presumably be resolved in favor of the criminal prosecution,” Justice William M. White Jr. wrote in his order that gave Read what she asked for and partially fulfilled the requests of two Canton bars also targeted in the civil lawsuit.

Read case background

Read, 44, of Mansfield, was charged in Norfolk Superior Court on June 9, 2022, with second-degree murder (Count 1), motor vehicle manslaughter (Count 2), and leaving the scene of a collision causing death (Count 3). She is accused of mowing down her boyfriend of two years, Boston Police Officer John O’Keefe, with her SUV and leaving him to freeze and die on a Canton front lawn in the early morning of Jan. 29, 2022.

A trial in that same court ended on July 1 with a hung jury and a new trial is scheduled to begin on Jan. 27.

The case has not been quiet since the trial ended. Read’s attorneys shortly after the trial ended said that jurors came forward to say that they were unanimously ready to acquit Read on Counts 1 and 3 and were only hung on Count 2 but didn’t know how to indicate a partial verdict. This information, Read’s team argues, means she should only be retried on the manslaughter charge in January.

Norfolk Superior Court Judge Beverly J. Cannone disagreed and denied their motion, so Read’s team took it to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. Norfolk prosecutors are fighting back there and a resolution is pending.

Amid all that, the O’Keefe family filed a wrongful death civil lawsuit against Read as well as two bars they argue over served her the evening before she allegedly killed John O’Keefe. The lawsuit was filed in Plymouth Superior Court on Aug. 26, with John O’Keefe’s only surviving sibling, brother Paul O’Keefe, serving as the plaintiff representative.

The decision

Justice White in his nine-page Thursday order said that his job was to “balance the competing interests” of timeliness, the “fair adjudication of a civil wrong,” the possible prejudicial collateral of a stay, “and the potential harm to the defendant from being compelled to choose between defending herself in the civil action and protecting herself from criminal prosecution.”

The O’Keefe family has argued that delaying their civil case would lead to “degradation of evidence.

“Specifically, they argue that restaurant employees and third-party witnesses may experience fading memories or become uncooperative over time,” White wrote. “Given the extensive investigation into O’Keefe’s death and the completed first prosecution, the risk that evidence will be unpreserved and witness memories fade does not appear to be substantial.”

White noted that “There is no constitutional requirement that civil proceeding must yield to a criminal one” before ultimately deciding that a relatively brief stay — which he anticipated at six months — would cause little harm to the plaintiffs against the great potential harm against Read should she have to fight both court battles at the same time.

“Participation in the civil case poses the danger to the defendant of an increased likelihood of conviction at the criminal trial by self-incrimination through exposure to cross-examination,” White wrote. “Despite the strategic dilemma posed by parallel proceedings, the refusal to stay a civil case pending the outcome of a criminal prosecution does not violate due process, even where the defendant’s refusal to testify in the civil case creates an adverse inference against her.”

As for the two Canton bars where Read, John O’Keefe and a slew of other witnesses in the case partied together just ahead of O’Keefe’s death, White said that their request for a stay would be in effect “to the extent that the scheduled deposition of defendant Karen Read and other discovery from defendant Karen Read are STAYED pending the” criminal case retrial.

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