Jury deliberations in the murder trial of Karen Read lasted five days before Judge Beverly Cannone declared a mistrial, despite testimony stretching more than eight weeks and hundreds of exhibits introduced into evidence. Yet, experts say, five days represents significant deliberations on the part of the jury.
Dan Conley, a former Suffolk County District Attorney and a partner at Mintz, said he has seen jury deliberations get longer and longer — even in cases with far less complexity than that of Read.
“Longer deliberation is becoming more and more the norm rather than the exception,” he told MassLive in an interview on Monday.
In 1984, when Conley became a prosecutor, he said deliberations often lasted only a day or a day and a half. But, by 2018, when Conley left his role as district attorney, he said he often saw deliberations go for three or four days.
In the Read case specifically, Conley said he was not surprised the deliberations took as long as they did.
“The fact that this went five days or so, I think it’s not all that unusual considering the length of the trial,” he said. “It took a while. They had to really work through an awful lot of evidence and then apply the law to that evidence that they heard over weeks and weeks. It was not an unusual amount of time.
“This was obviously a very complicated case with a lot of witnesses, a lot of very conflicting evidence,” Conley added. “I didn’t think it was an outlier at all that it went as long as it did.”
Read, 44, of Mansfield, was charged with second-degree murder, manslaughter while operating a vehicle under the influence, and leaving the scene of an accident causing injury or death in the death of her Boston police officer boyfriend, John O’Keefe, 46. Prosecutors accused her of intentionally hitting O’Keefe with her SUV after an argument following a night of drinking.
Her attorneys argued instead that others were responsible for O’Keefe’s death and Read was the victim of a law enforcement conspiracy.
Maureen Boyle, a professor at Stonehill College and a longtime crime reporter, said she wouldn’t have been surprised if deliberations went longer than five days.
“If anything, I would say it was kind of short,” Boyle said Monday. “A jury in the retrial may come back in two days, it may come back in two hours. No one can predict a jury. Anyone who claims that they can read or predict what a jury is going to do doesn’t understand juries.”
Jurors told Cannone on Friday and again at about 11 a.m. Monday morning they were unable to reach a unanimous decision. Cannone gave them a Tuey-Rodriguez instruction, which is given when a jury isn’t able to come to a verdict as a “last-ditch effort” and is also usually a precursor to a hung jury, according to Daniel Medwed, a law professor at Northeastern University
Medwed said he thought the time — 2½ hours — between when jurors were given the Tuey-Rodriguez instruction and when a mistrial was declared was “quick” but said five days represented substantial deliberations.
Beyond the formal deliberations, Medwed noted jurors had been considering the evidence for months before deliberations even began.
“In a long trial like this, they have been processing the evidence at a very high level for months,” Medwed said, adding the jury had been “consumed by this for months.”
“They’ve also spent a lot of time thinking about some of the fundamental issues in the case, whether she did or didn’t do it,” he continued. “It’s not just that they deliberated for five days. It’s also that they took part in a two-month trial where they were breathing this case.”
The Norfolk County District Attorney’s office announced shortly after the mistrial was declared that it would re-try the case. Cannone could set a new trial date as soon as a status conference scheduled for 2 p.m. on July 22.
If a retrial is ordered, it must begin within a year of that date, said David Traub, the Norfolk District Attorney’s spokesman, citing Rule 36D of the Rules of Criminal Procedure in Massachusetts.
