I haven’t followed the Karen Read trial. It’s rare for me to stay too engaged in a pending publicized trial, and like you will hear many professional athletes state that they don’t watch their sport during downtime, I imagine it’s true for my profession as well.

But I viewed the new Max true-crime docuseries, A Body in the Snow: The Trial of Karen Read. It aired two weeks before her retrial, which is still ongoing.

The five-part series examines the events of Jan. 29, 2022, when Read found her then-boyfriend, Boston police officer John O’Keefe, unresponsive in a snowbank that resulted from blizzard-like conditions the night before. Read and O’Keefe had been out drinking with friends that evening; she had dropped O’Keefe off in the front yard of the residence where he was found. He had planned to meet friends and fellow law enforcement officers there to continue socializing.

According to the occupants of the home, O’Keefe never made it inside. State witnesses allege that Read frantically admitted to hitting O’Keefe with her vehicle, which just so happened to have a broken taillight allegedly attributed to the collision, the next morning.

Read and her defense team have stuck by a different narrative, though: The SODDI (some other dude did it) defense. It seemed to have worked for her 2024 trial, which resulted in a mistrial due to a hung jury.

I’ve written about the SODDI defense before; it is a mainstay in my profession. Also known as the third-party perpetrator defense, pointing a finger at another potential perpetrator is a very valid method of showing a jury that the prosecution cannot meet its burden.

And ultimately, that’s where A Body in the Snow really finds its footing. The firsthand portrayal of jury trial preparation is its strong suit. The defense team is good. They know what they’re doing in court.

Still, the entire time I watched, I couldn’t help but ask myself, “What are her attorneys thinking?” Why would they allow their client to participate in a documentary about her trial leading up to her trial?

Because Read, who did not testify in her first trial, does not present well.

Appearances are everything

I’m not commenting on her as a person. I don’t know Read, and I don’t care about her guilt or innocence. I’m speaking about her appearance as a criminally accused individual charged with murder.

In my experience, criminal defendants who testify fall into two categories: sympathetic or righteously indignant. Suppose the decedent is someone personally related to the accused. In that case, there will most often be some form of sympathy or sadness related to the death, regardless of culpability—someone they care about has died, after all.

That can change when circumstances show the necessity to defend oneself or another. In those situations, along with incidents where the accused didn’t know the decedent or feels wrongfully accused, self-preservation is understandable. That feeling likely takes precedence over any emotional response to the loss of human life.

But in Read’s case, this was her boyfriend of two years. O’Keefe was someone she likely loved; however, when she speaks about him, there’s no sympathy or even attempts at sincerity regarding his death. Even if she was not complicit in the homicide, you would think she would feel some sadness about his death—or at least shed a tear or two like so many others in his life who were interviewed.

I understand that she’s been through the ringer preserving her innocence, but you can balance that with compassion. Instead, she comes off as self-centered. She seems more concerned with how she’ll appear on television than how she’ll appear in the eyes of a jury. Although there is a little discussion about her appearance in court, you’d think her attorneys would have been more heavy-handed in their attempts to create a sympathetic defendant.

But she comes off negatively sometimes, especially through her commentary. And the prosecution has the benefit of using Read’s own statements against her in the second trial. Every soundbite from A Body in the Snow is a potential weapon—and that’s not even considering her interviews with news outlets after the verdict.

A rare opportunity

So often in the true-crime genre, we’re left with only the remnants of litigation. Here, though, we get to see how and why the trial resulted in the verdict rendered while watching history repeat itself to one degree or another in the second trial. It’s fascinating.

I can’t help but think Read’s first trial ended in a hung jury primarily due to the defense putting all their eggs in the SODDI basket. Instead of the jury focusing on the prosecution’s burden, they may have focused on the alleged setup. It’s challenging enough to tell a believable story where multiple people work together so well to frame another individual, but that challenge becomes exponentially more difficult the more people you involve in the plan. It’s hard to show synchronicity at that level.

From what I’ve seen thus far, Read’s defense team is yet again shooting all their shots at one target.

Do people ever conspire to set up others? Most definitely. Do those cases make it to jury trial? Undoubtedly. Still, it’s a hard sell, especially when you involve the police. Because, ultimately, a skilled prosecutor always has Occam’s Razor in their back pocket.

But sometimes, that’s your only defense. We defense attorneys often find ourselves with a client walking into our office and metaphorically dumping out a box of puzzle pieces. As we meticulously put those pieces together, we start to realize this isn’t just one puzzle; it’s actually multiple puzzles, and some of the pieces are missing.

You have to assemble what you can, make a picture as coherent as possible, and then legally and ethically guess what the missing pieces are and how, or if, those different puzzles fit together.

It’s a game plan that can succeed in the right circumstances. And right now, the world gets to watch a high-profile defense operate within a playbook that’s already been broadcast over the jumbotron.

Read and her defense team may find out that a retrial is much harder on the defense than it is on the prosecution. Most often, a defendant wins their jury trial for one of two reasons: Either the prosecution’s case is that bad, or the defense was able to poke just enough holes in the armor of “proof beyond a reasonable doubt.”

But with this type of retrial, if the prosecution’s case is remotely solid, they have ample time to solder up all those holes. When the other team has your playbook, it’s tough to execute your plays.

Adam Banner

Adam R. Banner is the founder and lead attorney of the Oklahoma Legal Group, a criminal defense law firm in Oklahoma City. His practice focuses solely on state and federal criminal defense. He represents the accused against allegations of sex crimes, violent crimes, drug crimes and white-collar crimes.

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