DEDHAM, MASS. (WHDH) - 7NEWS spoke with Legal Analyst Tom Hoopes about what the defense did this time around in the Karen Read murder retrial compared to the first.
“I think that they had a chance to do a dry run the last time and they tuned it up a little better,” said Hoopes. “Their experts were a little better, they refined their message a little better, and they may have just gotten a better jury selection. Sometimes the mix of jury can make a difference. The prosecution put in as good a case as it could put in, [arguably] put in a better case than it did the last time, but it just didn’t have enough. There was just probably too many problems from the police investigation side to overcome by any prosecutor, no matter how great or good their efficient and effective they were.”
“I honestly think that they had developed the material that they needed to prove that it was beyond a reasonable doubt was just not gonna happen,” said Hoopes. “In other words, the heart of this might have been that she didn’t do it. The heart of it might have been something else, but what they’re really fighting for was reasonable doubt. And so they took advantage of every shred of ineffective police work that they could find. Questions they brought in, their own experts to question the commonwealth’s experts, so in the end, on the one side there were people who thought she did it, on the other hand there were people who didn’t think that she did it, but in the middle it seemed to me there was a large number of people who think that there just was a reasonable doubt whether she did it or didn’t. The American standard is in this country for a jury verdict is beyond a reasonable doubt they thought that there was a reasonable doubt.”
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