Ketanji Brown Jackson rejects Karen Read’s request to stop murder trial in ex-boyfriend’s death

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson denied Wednesday a request from Karen Read to bar a second murder trial against her in the death of her ex-boyfriend.

Ms. Read’s attorneys asked the high court earlier this week to delay her upcoming trial, which the Massachusetts woman claims would be double jeopardy.

Justice Jackson’s move, though, rejected the request to delay the second trial, in which jury selection already has begun.

She denied the request without comment or further elaboration.

In her first trial last year a jury agreed unanimously that Ms. Read was not guilty of second-degree murder and a separate charge over leaving the scene of a collision in which a death occurred. The jury had deadlocked on the third charge, of manslaughter.

But when the panel declared itself hopelessly deadlocked, a mistrial was declared. As a result, the decisions to acquit on some of the charges never became legally official.

Her attorneys claimed that having a second trial risks violating the double jeopardy clause of the Fifth Amendment, because the state would be trying Ms. Read for a crime on which she’d been acquitted.

Prosecutors charge that she killed her boyfriend John O’Keefe, a Boston police officer, after hitting him with her car and leaving him outside during a snowstorm the previous January.

She has denied any wrongdoing and argues that she is being framed by other police officers.