The jury came back deadlocked, and the judge declared a mistrial. Prosecutors have vowed they will retry Karen ... but, for now, she's a free woman.
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00:00Probably since OJ was the last time I've seen a trial and the reaction, the public reaction, was so passionate, really on both sides.
00:13The case in Boston of Karen Reed, who was accused of backing up her car, she did back up her car, and hit her boyfriend.
00:25Well, that part is up for debate, whether she actually hit the boyfriend.
00:30Well, up for debate.
00:31John O'Keefe was killed by a car hitting him.
00:35Right.
00:36It's more complicated, Charles.
00:38Okay.
00:39So, she's charged with murdering him. I mean, they actually did murder, manslaughter, involuntary manslaughter.
00:46They did the works on her, saying that she was with her boyfriend, who was a police officer there in Boston, and they were drunk, and they argued, and he got out of the car to go to a party, and she wasn't going to go in.
00:58She backed up and hit him. That's the prosecution's version.
01:01Right.
01:02She has a different version.
01:04Yes, she does, and the jury could not reach a verdict.
01:09They could not decide, and yesterday the judge had to declare a mistrial.
01:14There were cheers outside. There were protests.
01:17It was an incredible thing to witness, and a lot of people are upset about this.
01:25I just want to say one thing.
01:26She is alleging a massive police cover-up.
01:29She is saying that he went inside that house, and they killed him in the house, and a dog bit him in the house, and they put him outside, and the snow covered him until 6 the next morning, and that's when they discovered the body.
01:43But she is saying this is essentially police covering themselves and framing her.
01:50Right, and the lead investigator, by the way, Michael Proctor, has been fired.
01:54As of once the mistrial was declared, he was fired.
01:58So something clearly is going on here, and they have said that the prosecutors said they are going to retry this.
02:07Some people in Boston not really sure if that's going to happen.
02:10Joining us right now to talk about this is a Boston criminal defense attorney who has been following this case very closely all along, Peter Ellican.
02:20Welcome to TMZ Live.
02:21Hi, Peter.
02:22Thanks for having me.
02:23First of all, your take on the trial.
02:25Whose side are you on?
02:26You know, when I do legal analysis, I like to go straight down the middle, be fair, educate the public, do both.
02:32This one I had trouble doing because there was just no, they just did not prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt.
02:39I mean, there was no eyewitness to this.
02:41When the medical examiner from the state checked it out, said, well, blunt force trauma to the head, but we don't know whether that was a punch, a baseball bat, or a car hit him.
02:51And so we had experts on both sides canceling each other out.
02:55We had a police investigation that was unbelievably shoddy.
02:59And there were so many moving parts of this case that the general consensus, as a matter of fact, they were taking all kinds of polls.
03:06And the public here in Massachusetts who avidly followed it was 85 percent saying she should be found not guilty.
03:14This is pretty unprecedented around here.
03:16Most of the time you have, you know, crowds picketing outside of a courthouse.
03:21Usually it's because you hate the person accused there.
03:26But here she actually would get applause and cheers.
03:29And it was just sort of the consensus that most people thought that the case, even if you thought she was guilty, was not proven beyond a reasonable doubt.
03:37What do you make of the fact that the lead investigator was fired moments essentially after the mistrial was declared?
03:44Because that certainly makes you think that there was allegations of corruption in the investigation.
03:50Somebody, at least in the police force, felt that that was true.
03:53Yeah, we knew that the state police were having an internal affairs investigation on him.
03:57But also the feds, the U.S. attorney's office, was also investigating him and some of the other law enforcement officers, which they rarely do.
04:05I mean, people complain about the police, oh, they're unfair and all the time.
04:08It doesn't result in a federal investigation and hauling people into a grand jury.
04:13But this police officer, it was kind of, I'd have to say, pretty vilified the public.
04:17First of all, he was friends and with the family of the people in the house, and he didn't really investigate them at all.
04:24Normally, you just recuse yourself and say, well, I already know the people here.
04:28I can't be party to that.
04:30He was sending out texts to friends and family, talking about looking for nude photos of her, making fun of her multiple sclerosis and Crohn's disease, calling her names I couldn't repeat on TV.
04:41And then they had him, as I said, did not do a thorough investigation.
04:46For example, just very quickly, a body is found outside the house and you know that it's supposed to go to a party there the night before.
04:53You don't even search the house or go in and look at a crime scene, even if you wouldn't find anything.
04:58I mean, that's normal.
05:00It's crazy.
05:01It's crazy.
05:02So listen, so far, at least as of this moment that we're talking, we don't know what the split was on the jury, whether it was 10 to 2 for acquittal, whether it was 6 to 6.
05:12We just don't know.
05:13But I find it interesting, A, that without even knowing that, prosecutors said, we're retrying her.
05:20And B, how are they going to retry her when the first thing they ask on cross-examination of this lead investigator is, you were fired, right?
05:32You were fired because of this, right?
05:34How could you possibly get a conviction with that?
05:38Well, I think that's what made, what partially contributed to why it was so difficult this time to get a conviction.
05:44And it is true that within minutes of the mistrial being declared, the elected district attorney announced they would retry the case.
05:55I guess illegally is allowed to do that.
05:57Most of the time, they kind of step back.
06:00They want to see what the jury was saying.
06:02They can learn from it.
06:04That could guide another prosecution.
06:07Instead, it was just kind of, we don't want to hear anything.
06:09We're just jumping right in and back.
06:11And so we're going to go back to square one, start from scratch, and we're going to do a redo of the whole trial.
06:19And the trial lasted nine weeks.
06:21So it was quite an effort to suddenly say, all right, let's go back and do it all over again.
06:26Right.