After
a month’s worth of testimony
, Karen Read’s defense team and prosecution will today deliver their closing arguments.
Judge Beverly J. Cannone said she wants attorneys and jurors at the courthouse by 8:30 this morning so that closing arguments will get started by 9 on the dot, if not slightly earlier. Then she wants to give the jurors until after 5 p.m. for deliberations before the weekend break.
Thursday’s brief charge conference
offered a preview
of at least the defense case’s thrust: ” the Commonwealth had produced no witnesses to testify that John O’Keefe’s injuries were consistent with having been hit with a motor vehicle,” defense attorney David Yannetti said during his unsuccessful argument that Cannone make a finding of not guilty.
“And if he was not hit by a motor vehicle then none of these three indictments may stand,” he said.
Read, 45, of Mansfield,
faces charges
of second-degree murder, manslaughter while operating a motor vehicle under the influence, and leaving the scene of a collision causing death. She’s accused of slamming her Lexus LX570 SUV into
John O’Keefe
, her boyfriend and a Boston cop, and leaving him to freeze and die on a Canton front lawn on Jan. 29, 2022.
The defense expanded its case from
Read’s first trial last year
, with nearly double the witnesses and four times the days. In contrast, the new lead prosecutor Hank Brennan trimmed the prosecution’s case by five days.
Left out this time around was testimony from the case officer, which the defense calls the “lead investigator,” Massachusetts State Police Trooper Michael Proctor, who was was put on leave, then suspended and ultimately fired primarily for his behavior in the Read case. So too were entire threads from the first trial like a trip to Aruba just weeks before O’Keefe died in which witnesses say Read lost it in a jealous rage.
Brennan instead used Read’s own words against her this time around. He played clips from media interviews in which she talked about drinking and her initial thoughts that maybe she had “clipped” O’Keefe as she drove away after dropping him off for an afterparty at 34 Fairview Road.
In their
opening statements
, the defense and prosecution each said the case comes down to three words, ones they each hope stuck with jurors throughout the trial.
For the prosecution it was Read’s alleged admission at the scene: “I hit him.”
For the defense it is “There was no collision.”
