Canton Coverup Part 400: Karen Read SJC To Overturn Denial Of Motion To Dismiss Cites Turtleboy Interview With Juror, Alec Murdaugh Post-Trial Evidentiary Hearing

 

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Karen Read’s appeal to the Supreme Judicial Court was filed yesterday, asking the State’s highest court to overturn Beverly Cannone’s denial of a motion to dismiss on Double Jeopardy grounds.

SJ-2024-0332_P001_Petition for Relief Pursuant to G.L.c. 211, sec. 3 with Certificate of Service

The motion is almost 40 pages long, and contains a 300+ page document filled with exhibits (mostly court transcripts and other documents cited in the motion). Let’s start off with the best part – Attorney Martin Weinberg cited my interview with a juror in part 397 of the Canton Coverup series, who told me that the unanimous vote to acquit Karen Read of second degree murder happened shortly after deliberations began.

The juror in a follow up interview has confirmed that the first time they officially voted on this was the second day of deliberations. He told me that they took many polls like this, and after a while they stopped conducting votes on the murder charge because it was 12-0 in favor of not guilty every time. This juror is more than willing to swear to this, and is not one of the jurors who previously reached out to the defense.

Weinberg pointed out the obvious in the appeal – if the unanimous votes on counts 1 and 3 were not in fact unanimous for not guilty, then a juror certainly would’ve written an affidavit correcting this. But they haven’t.

Auntie Bev blamed the defense in her ruling, stating that they failed to object to her ruling of a mistrial. But anyone who was actually watching knew that she dismissed the jurors before even declaring a mistrial. Silence in the moment is not consent.

The defense had no idea that the jury had written a note to Cannone, telling her they were at an impasse, until they got into the courtroom. Thus they were not prepared to object to her immediate declaration of a mistrial.

 

Cannone also blamed the defense because they were the ones who asked her to issued a Tuey-Rodriguez charge, which ultimately led to the mistrial. But as Weinberg pointed out in the appeal, the Tuey-Rodriguez charge is supposed to urge the jurors to come to reach a verdict, not avoid one.

 

Auntie Bev also denied the motion to dismiss because she accused the defense of wanting to inquire about the substance of jury deliberations, which they are not allowed to do. But as Weinberg pointed out, they don’t want to know about what the jurors were deliberating over. They just want to poll them to ask what the results of their deliberations were.

The motion cites the Alec Murdaugh case, in which an evidentiary hearing was held several months after Murdaugh’s conviction for murder, in order to see if a clerk named Becky Hill had influenced the jurors to vote guilty. Although the result of the evidentiary hearing was that the jurors were not influenced by Hill, the fact remains that the court at least allowed for an evidentiary hearing where jurors testified about what occurred while they were deliberating. That is what Read’s defense team believes she deserves – an evidentiary hearing where the 12 jurors are polled about whether or not they voted to acquit her on charges 1 and 3.

Massachusetts courts have allowed jurors to be paneled after a conviction as a result of allegations of racial bias. Karen Read is not alleging racial bias, but that shouldn’t preclude her from being able to have an evidentiary hearing since her civil rights would be violated if she was retried for a crime that a jury informally voted to acquit her of.

Yesterday when the motion was filed in court there was confusion about why a May 24 sidebar transcript was impounded.

That was during Brian Higgins’ testimony. We now know, based on the filings, that at that sidebar Judge Cannone was asking Karen Read if she consented to not having Alan Jackson in court for the second day of Higgins’ cross examination. The point is that Cannone went out of her way to make sure that Read consented to one of her 3 lawyers not being there for one day of trial, but in her ruling to deny the motion to dismiss she stated that Read had consented to a mistrial despite not even being asked about it by Cannone. Declaring a mistrial is far more consequential to Read than not having one of her lawyers for one day of trial.

I have no idea how the SJC will rule on this, but it would be pretty awesome if Karen Read’s murder charge was dismissed AND Beverly Cannone was thoroughly humiliated in the process, which she would be if she was overruled.