Karen Read asks Supreme Court to prevent retrial for murder
(WASHINGTON) — Karen Read has filed an emergency petition with the Supreme Court seeking an immediate stay of her retrial — which has begun jury selection — pending review by the high court on her claims of constitutional violation.
“Read’s Petition contends that her scheduled retrial on two of the three counts pending against her, including a charge of second-degree murder, will violate the Double Jeopardy Clause because the jury in her first trial reached a final and unanimous, but unannounced, decision that she is not guilty of those charges.”
Read is accused of killing her boyfriend, Boston police officer John O’Keefe, in January 2022. Prosecutors alleged Read hit O’Keefe with her vehicle and left him to die as Boston was hit with a major blizzard. Read has denied the allegations and maintained her innocence.
She was charged with first-degree murder, manslaughter while operating a motor vehicle under the influence and leaving the scene of a fatal accident. She pleaded not guilty.
Read’s first trial ended in a mistrial last July after the jury deadlocked following five days of deliberations.
“Despite our rigorous efforts we find ourselves at an impasse,” Judge Beverly Cannone said, reading a note from the jury. “The deep division is not due to lack of consideration but to a severe adherence to our personal beliefs and moral compasses. To continue to deliberate would be futile.”
In response, Cannone stated, “Your service is complete. I am declaring a mistrial.”
Read’s attorneys have asked multiple appeals courts — and now the Supreme Court — to dismiss the charges of second-degree murder and leaving the scene of a fatal accident in the retrial. They argued in court filings that retrying her on the charges would violate double jeopardy protections because, based on subsequent statements from four jurors, the jury had reached a unanimous decision to acquit Read on the charges.
The case has drawn national attention. “A Body in the Snow: The Trial of Karen Read,” a documentary about the case, premiered last month on Netflix.
There’s no timetable for the Supreme Court to rule on the emergency petition.
“Petitioner respectfully urges the Court to stay jury selection or, alternatively, the swearing of the jury in this matter until this Court has ruled on Read’s Petition,” the lawyers wrote in her filing.
Jury selection has been slow going. The process was expected to take weeks. On Monday, no new jurors were added after bringing in 45 candidates. Ten jurors were seated on the first week of jury selection, which started a week ago.
ABC News’ Meghan Mariani contributed to this report.
(WASHINGTON) — When unemployed marine biologist Lanny Flaherty poked his head into the ranger’s station at the Wallowa Whitman National Forest in the Pacific Northwest and asked to be a volunteer, he said it put him on a 13-year career path with the U.S. Forest Service that included stints as a botanist, a wildfire resource adviser and a range ecologist.
When he wasn’t researching the effects of vegetation on fire behavior or identifying fungi on national forest land, the 40-year-old Flaherty said he was a “red-card” carrying certified firefighter, helping battle some of the biggest wildland fires in the nation.
In 2016, he helped fight the Great Smoky Mountain wildfires, the largest arson blazes in Tennessee history, and in 2021, he helped extinguish the Dixie Fire that swept through five Northern California counties, scorching nearly a million acres and destroying more than 1,300 structures.
“I’m so proud of everything I’ve done,” Flaherty told ABC News. “Stumbling into the Forest Service was the first time in my life where I was like, ‘Oh, this fits. I’m running with it. This is me.'”
But while on assignment last week with a U.S. Forest Service fire engine crew in Louisiana restoring federal land and structures at the Kisatchie National Forest that had been devastated by hurricanes, Flaherty said his job came to an abrupt end.
As a probationary range ecologist, he was among several thousand probationary workers terminated from the U.S. Forest Service in the Trump administration’s sweeping reduction in the federal workforce being overseen by billionaire Elon Musk and the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
“It’s absolutely heartbreaking to end up under the bus on what’s obviously a politically motivated illegal termination,” said Flaherty, whose two-year probationary period wasn’t scheduled to end until November of this year. “I mean, I’ve got 13 years’ worth of qualifications and I was cast aside as a probationary employee, despite having proven myself time and time again in a multitude of different positions.”
The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees the U.S. Forest Service, announced that 2,000 USFS “probationary, non-firefighting employees” were being let go. At least 1,000 probationary employees of the National Park Service, which is under the U.S. Interior Department, were also terminated, including those who worked as secondary firefighters.
“To be clear, none of these individuals were operational firefighters,” USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins said in a statement.
Rollins, according to the USDA statement, “fully supports the President’s directive to improve government, eliminate inefficiencies, and strengthen USDA’s many services to the American people.”
“We have a solemn responsibility to be good stewards of the American people’s hard-earned taxpayer dollars and to ensure that every dollar spent goes to serve people, not the bureaucracy,” the USDA statement reads.
‘These fires are going to get exponentially bigger’
While hosting a roundtable in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday with U.S. Forest Service wildland firefighters, Rollins praised their response to the devastating January wildfires in Los Angeles County that decimated the communities of Pacific Palisades and Altadena. Following the meeting, the USDA released a statement, saying, Rollins is “committed to ensuring that the United States has the strongest and most prepared wildland firefighting force in the world to save lives and protect our beautiful homeland.”
But the National Federation of Federal Employees (NFFE) told ABC News that the USFS cuts will severely weaken the agency’s ability to respond to wildfires.
Steve Gutierrez, NFFE’s national business representative, said that based on data the union requested from the USFS, the number of fired probationary non-fire personnel is about 3,400.
Flaherty said that in the past five years, 40% to 50% of his job was fighting wildfires as part of what the Forest Services refers to as “militias” comprised of trained secondary firefighters.
“When a fire breaks out, we’re out there like everybody else getting into the fray,” Flaherty said.
Gutierrez, a former USFS firefighter, told ABC News that the cuts affect about 10% of the U.S. Forest Service’s total workforce. He said many of the terminated employees held dual jobs, like Flaherty, including working as firefighters responding to all-hands-on-deck blazes throughout the country.
“When I say ‘non-fire personnel,’ we can’t totally think that they don’t ever touch fire, that they’re not important,” Gutierrez said. “They’re all part of this logistical machine that helps support fire. They’re either ecologists, they’re mechanics, they’re pilots, they’re water systems operators, they’re grants and agreements folks, they’re land management, minerals and geologists to help recovery efforts from the aftereffect of fire.”
He added, “They support all of what happens before fire, during a fire and after a fire.”
Gutierrez said some of the federal employees who got fired had just helped battle the Los Angeles fires just weeks ago.
“They just fought this fire in LA, one of LA’s most devastating wildfires that we’ve ever had and now they’re terminated because they have ‘poor performance,'” Gutierrez said. “It’s just crazy to me that you can be so utterly disrespectful and ultimately it’s a slap in the face to these brave men and women who have risked their lives for the American public.”
Making matters worse, Gutierrez said, is an imposed hiring freeze, which has stalled the annual task of “fuels management,” which means clearing federal lands of fire hazards like dead trees and overgrown brush.
“If we’re not able to get that process moving immediately, fires are not going to just be, like, small. These fires are going to get exponentially bigger. Communities are going to burn and people are going to die, and that’s what’s going to happen,” Gutierrez said. “It’s not going to be just a California problem. It’s going to be a United States problem. I mean, there are several states, New Jersey, for example, they had a fire every year, every month for the past year. There was a fire in New York, right there in Manhattan. It’s not going to stop. It’s a national issue.”
Almost stranded in Louisiana
Flaherty said that when he got a call in Louisiana from his forest supervisor relating that he was terminated effective immediately with no severance package, he was initially told he’d have to get his own transportation back to Oregon.
“He offered no solution whatsoever, despite being fully aware of the fact that I would be stranded in Louisiana and unable to make travel arrangements short of purchasing myself a ticket. I was not in Louisiana on my own time, I was there on official travel and his plan was to, I guess, just wing it,” Flaherty said.
Flaherty said his union, the NFFE, intervened and got the USFS to cover his transportation by temporarily rescinding his termination until it got him back to Oregon.
“It’s just really sad that the top of the food chain doesn’t understand the impacts of what they’re doing when they swipe their pen,” said Gutierrez, responding to Flaherty almost being stranded in Louisiana. “They don’t understand the complexities of the entirety of the government.”
Flaherty said the “insult still rings true even though I am back home.”
“To me, that just kind of sums up how callous and poorly thought out all of this is,” Flaherty said. “I have deep, deep concerns for the amount of stress that everybody has been put through in every agency, and it just continues. It’s harming people’s physical and mental well-being, and it’s criminal.”
‘Dream job’
Eric Anderson said that in June 2024 he landed a job as a biological science technician and lead fire effects monitor for the National Park Service, after working since 2021 as a seasonal employee.
“I spent two years, three years working as a temporary hire to keep my face seen, to improve my qualifications, to gain more experience. And now, I finally get into a position that I knew three years ago, OK, my predecessor, is probably going to be retiring. I think I can improve my qualifications and become useful to do that position. And I worked toward it, I applied, and I got the position.”
Like Flaherty, Anderson, 48, a married father of two high school-aged children, told ABC News that he was fired in what he called, “the Valentine’s Day massacre.”
“You finally get your dream job that you’ve been working toward for many years, and it just got pulled out from under you for politics,” said Anderson, who was stationed at the Indiana Dunes National Park on the southern shore of Lake Michigan.
He said he received his dismissal letter in his email inbox from an Interior Department administrator he had never met.
“The Department determined that you have failed to demonstrate fitness or qualifications for continued employment because your subject matter knowledge, skills, and abilities do not meet the Department’s current needs, and it is necessary and appropriate to terminate, during the probationary period, your appointment to the position of BioScience Tech (Fire Eff. Monitor),” reads the dismissal letter Anderson shared with ABC News.
“This is a lie. This says I’m fired because of my performance and my inability to do the job and that I’m no longer needed. My performance evaluations are excellent, and I’m crucial to the program. I have qualifications that we need within our unit to function,” Anderson said. “It’s a bit maddening.”
A former Peace Corps volunteer from 2000 to 2002 in Kenya, East Africa, Anderson said he used to work as a consultant in the private sector and took a huge pay cut when he joined the NPS as a seasonal employee.
“My bosses worked really hard to justify that I should be kept on, noting that in my position description, yes, it says biological science technician, but if you just read down a few lines, you see the box checked that says wildland firefighter, which was supposed to be in the protected ones that weren’t getting fired,” Anderson said.
In his job as a biological science technician, he said he would collect plant samples for analysis and prepped parklands in the winter months for the fire season, eliminating hazardous fuels by conducting prescribed or controlled burns. His work also included rehabilitating burned land.
“When bulldozers come through trying to protect towns, someone has to put that back together. So, we worked very much on how do we keep this from washing down the mountain during the next atmospheric river,” Anderson said. “By mid-August or so, we’re pretty much done with our sampling at various parks around the Great Lakes that we go to, and then we are available to do wildland fire or help as collaterals for wildland fires,” Anderson said. “A lot of the people that were let go in the last week were also collateral firefighters.”
In September, Anderson worked on the front lines of the Line Fire that burned more than 44,000 acres in and around the San Bernardino National Forest and threatened the community of Highland, California. In August 2023, Anderson said he helped battle the Happy Camp Complex Fire, which burned more than 21,000 acres in the Klamath National Forest in Northern California’s Siskiyou County.
He just returned in January from conducting prescribed fires in the Florida Everglades.
“Maybe, this is that Peace Corps volunteer in me that looks for mission-driven work. I know that’s just my personality type. I need to be working somewhere that I feel it’s important,” Anderson said. “I very much want to go back and work for the place that I was just fired from. I live what I do. These are all very qualified, excellent people doing good work that needs to be done and they’re just slashed without any real cause.”
(NEW YORK) — Federal prosecutors are urging a judge to sentence disgraced former U.S. Rep. George Santos to seven years and three months in prison, calling his conduct a “brazen web of deceit” that defrauded donors, misled voters, and fueled his political rise through lies, theft, and identity fraud.
The government outlined the extent of Santos’s fraudulent activity across the 2020 and 2022 election cycles in a detailed sentencing memo filed on Friday.
Prosecutors allege Santos, 35, with the help of former Campaign Treasurer Nancy Marks, falsified Federal Election Commission filings, fabricating donor contributions and inflating fundraising totals to meet the $250,000 threshold required to join the National Republican Congressional Committee’s (NRCC) coveted “Young Guns” program. Marks pleaded guilty and is awaiting sentencing in June.
When informed he hadn’t reached the NRCC benchmark, Santos texted an associate, “We are going to do this a little differently. I got it.”
That “different” approach included submitting fake donations attributed to family members, fictitious individuals and even identities stolen from elderly supporters, according to the filing.
In tandem, Santos was running a fraudulent political consulting firm, Redstone Strategies LLC, falsely presenting it as a registered Super PAC or 501(c)(4) nonprofit. It was neither, according to prosecutors.
Prosecutors say Santos used Redstone to launder donor money, keep commissions and fund personal expenses. In one scheme, he used an elderly woman’s credit card — originally provided for a one-time donation — to charge $12,000 through Redstone’s merchant account, netting himself $11,580 after fees. He wired the money directly into his personal bank account.
When questioned by his business partner, Santos lied, claiming the woman — who suffers from a brain injury — was a consulting client, according to the filing. Between February and August 2022, prosecutors say Santos used her credit card repeatedly, attributing donations to her, her daughter, or fictitious names.
Another victim, referred to as “Individual 2” in the filing, had their credit card charged at least five times in March 2022, totaling more than $30,000 in fake campaign contributions, including some attributed to Santos’s uncle and to people who didn’t exist. These donations were strategically routed to other campaigns that were clients of Redstone, ensuring Santos earned a financial kickback while boosting his political visibility.
In July 2020, he used another victim’s credit card to contribute $28,400 to his own campaign, some under the name of a personal friend who neither donated nor gave consent, according to the filing.
In April 2022, prosecutors say Santos falsely reported a $500,000 personal loan to his campaign, enabling him to boast an $800,000 Q1 fundraising haul. He approved a press release promoting the lie and pitched the narrative in conversations with Republican leaders, including a sitting congresswoman. According to the prosecution, the loan never existed.
That lie, combined with his doctored FEC filings and a fabricated resume claiming degrees from NYU and jobs at Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, helped Santos secure Young Guns status from the NRCC in June 2022. The designation brought significant support: $103,000 in advertising, $33,000 in polling, and direct contributions from joint fundraising efforts.
However, by fall 2022, campaign staffers discovered the truth. When confronted about the nonexistent loan, Santos admitted it wasn’t real and scrambled to fill the gap by soliciting a $450,000 loan from a donor referred to as “Individual 1” in the filing. Santos wired $400,000 of it to his campaign, never reported it to the FEC, and never repaid the donor. He covered the remaining $100,000 by misappropriating more funds from the same donor via Redstone.
Santos was expelled from Congress in December 2023 and has pleaded guilty wire fraud and aggravated identity fraud.
Defense attorneys said in their own memo Santos deserves no more than two years in prison, arguing he “accepted full responsibility for his actions.”
“This plea is not just an admission of guilt,” Santos told reporters in August. “It’s an acknowledgment that I need to be held accountable like any other American that breaks the law.”
The former congressman’s sentencing is on April 30.
Sylvain Gaboury/Paul Bruinooge/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images
(NEW YORK) — Ghislaine Maxwell asked the U.S. Supreme Court on Friday to overturn her sex-trafficking conviction, arguing she was covered by a non-prosecution agreement the government made with her former paramour, Jeffrey Epstein.
Maxwell is currently serving a 20-year prison sentence. She was convicted on five counts of aiding Epstein in his abuse of underage girls in December 2021.
A federal appeals court rejected her argument that Epstein’s non-prosecution agreement, arranged in 2007, barred her prosecution in New York. She urged the U.S. Supreme Court to reconsider her case.
“Despite the existence of a non-prosecution agreement promising in plain language that the United States would not prosecute any co-conspirator of Jeffrey Epstein, the United States in fact prosecuted Ghislaine Maxwell as a co-conspirator of Jeffrey Epstein,” her attorneys wrote in their petition.
Maxwell said the US Supreme Court should resolve differences of opinion among federal appeals court as to whether a non-prosecution arranged in one district can be enforced in another.
“A defendant should be able to rely on a promise that the United States will not prosecute again, without being subject to a gotcha in some other jurisdiction that chooses to interpret that plain language promise in some other way,” defense attorney David Markus wrote.
Four women testified at trial they had been abused as minors at Epstein’s homes in Florida, New York, New Mexico and the Virgin Islands and said Maxwell, the daughter of British newspaper magnate Robert Maxwell, had talked them into giving Epstein massages that turned sexual. They testified they were lured with gifts and promises about how Epstein could use his money and connections to help them.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
