A Coast Guard appeals court authorized the retrial of Petty Officer 2nd Class Kathleen Richard in the death of her 5-month-old daughter. The same court had previously overturned a jury verdict that acquitted her of first-degree murder but convicted her of involuntary manslaughter. (Joshua Magbanua/U.S. Air Force)
A Coast Guard petty officer who was released from prison after her involuntary manslaughter conviction in her infant daughter’s death was overturned could face a military court again.
The service’s Court of Criminal Appeals this month denied Petty Officer 2nd Class Kathleen Richard’s petition to prevent prosecutors from having the ability to retry her.
The 3-0 ruling on Jan. 7 upheld the decision of a military judge who rejected her argument that prosecuting her again would violate her constitutional protection against double jeopardy.
Richard, who remains in the Coast Guard, was freed in 2024 after the same appeals court tossed out the guilty verdict. She had served two years of a six-year sentence for killing the 5-month-old girl, who died in her crib in 2020.
At the time of the girl’s death, Richard was 25 and a yeoman stationed in Kodiak, Alaska.
A military jury in February 2022 acquitted Richard of first-degree murder but convicted her of involuntary manslaughter.
The case, which examined the young mother’s mental health and postpartum depression, was the Coast Guard’s first murder prosecution in more than a decade, according to The Washington Post.
In the 2024 ruling that overturned the conviction, the appellate court judges said prosecutors hadn’t clearly defined how Richard caused the baby’s death.
An autopsy determined that the infant had died of asphyxia and noted that she was tightly swaddled when placed in her crib.
Coast Guard prosecutors later referred the case to a second general court-martial, accusing Richard of involuntary manslaughter, according to court documents.
In October 2025, her request to have the new charge dismissed on Fifth Amendment grounds was denied.
Prosecutors who tried Richard said that while alone with her daughter for about 10 minutes, she had tightly swaddled the screaming infant, then held her face into the mattress for up to 90 seconds, The Washington Post reported.
In the Jan. 7 ruling, the appeals court agreed with Richard that the guilty verdict at trial was ambiguous.
The judges noted that the specification alleged Richard had killed her daughter “by asphyxia” without further clarifying what she did or did not do to cause her infant’s death.
But Richard’s double-jeopardy argument didn’t pass muster with the appeals court, which rejected the contention that she “was quite possibly already acquitted of” the crimes alleged in the effort to retry her.
The jury may have acquitted Richard of murder because they believed she did not press the child’s head into the mattress, or they may have believed she did so but without intent to harm or kill her child, the appeals ruling states.
“This is far from finding that petitioner was acquitted of pressing the child’s head into the mattress,” the judges ruled.
