DEDHAM, Mass. — It’s the fifth day of testimony in the murder retrial of Karen Read, accused of killing her Boston Police officer boyfriend, John O’Keefe, in 2022.

It comes as the U.S. Supreme Court has denied her Double Jeopardy appeal, ending her last hope for the case to be dismissed.

The day is expected to be a half-day for jurors, but a longer day overall as attorneys question two defense witnesses to set the parameters of their testimony.

Norfolk Superior Court Judge Beverly J. Cannone told jurors at the end of Friday that the trial is on schedule.

Read, 45, of Mansfield, faces charges of second-degree murder, manslaughter while operating a motor vehicle under the influence, and leaving the scene of an accident causing death.

Prosecutors say that Read backed her Lexus SUV into O’Keefe at up to 24 mph in the early morning hours of Jan. 29, 2022, leaving him to freeze and die. She was tried last year but that ended in mistrial.

It’s going to be a full week of Karen Read with today’s fifth day in court set to start at 9 a.m. We’ll keep you covered with key updates.

Cell data

Monday saw the return of prosecution forensic digital analyst Ian Whiffin of the firm Cellebrite from the first trial.

Whiffin testified that an analysis of John O’Keefe’s cell phone data showed that the phone, and thus presumably O’Keefe himself, was in an area centered around the front yard of 34 Fairview Road, within 10 meters, between around 12:30 a.m. to after 6 a.m.

That’s the time that previous witness Kerry Roberts testified she removed the phone from the ground, where it had been covered by O’Keefe’s body, and put it in her pocket to later give to a first responder.

“My opinion is that the device never moved far from the flagpole,” Whiffin said.

Whiffin’s appearance so early in the trial marks yet another dramatic departure from the trial’s structure from the last time. Whiffin was the 65th witness, called on the 24th day back then.

Supreme Court decision

Read’s team on April 1, the same day jury selection began in for her retrial, filed a petition for a Writ of Certiorari to the U.S. Supreme Court in a final effort to have two of the charges dismissed against her. They argue that jurors came forward after last year’s mistrial to say they were ready to unanimously acquit her of the murder charge and leaving the scene of a collision charge and were only hung on the manslaughter charge.

Read’s team argues that these post-trial disclosures are tantamount to verdicts and that to retry Read on these charges would be a violation of her constitutional protection from Double Jeopardy prosecution.

The argument had failed before Judge Cannone, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, the federal district court in Boston, and the federal Court of Appeals for the First Circuit before Read’s team appealed to the Supreme Court.

“The jury’s not guilty verdicts were not announced because the trial court, believing but not confirming that the impasse reported in a series of three juror notes applied to all, rather than only some, counts, never inquired regarding the scope of the deadlock and the jurors failed to volunteer to the trial court that their impasse was limited to one of the three counts rather than all,” the petition stated.

The petition argues that the First Circuit’s conclusions in the Read appeal “runs contrary to this Court’s repeated emphasis, over more than a century, that what constitutes an acquittal for purposes of the Double Jeopardy Clause is controlled by substance, not form.”

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