One day, not long into the penalty phase, Christiane Gehami, the owner of a small restaurant in the suburb of West Hartford, tells the court she employed Hayes the previous fall, washing dishes. “He was good-natured, he was jovial, he made people laugh,” she says. “He blended.” Gehami has small eyes that dart around the room, and her voice is confident. Toward the end of her testimony, her real purpose as a witness is revealed. Ullmann asks her about the time when Hayes, her jovial dishwasher, introduced her to a friend of his, Joshua Komisarjevsky.
“I took one look at him and I thought I was looking at the devil,” she says. “My skin crawled. My hair stood on end.”
At this, Hanna, who for weeks has endured hour after hour, day after day of excruciating, horrifying testimony with a face as stone-solid as her brother Bill’s, smiles in disbelief at this seeming attempt to exculpate Hayes and buries her face in her hand. This is too much.
Hayes’s thirty-year history of burglaries is presented in great detail. He used to drive to a local reservoir, in the same stolen car every day, and knock out car windows when their owners went for walks, snatching purses and wallets. He was friends with prostitutes, his lawyers establish, and did a lot of drugs. But one of the most painful parts of the penalty phase for Bill is the testimony from the mental-health experts. One guy from Texas, a clinical and forensic psychologist, testifies at length about a slide presentation titled “Violence Risk Assessment,” an academic consideration of whether Hayes would be likely to show violence toward other inmates and prison guards while serving a life sentence. “In prison lore,” the man says, “it has long been recognized that convicted murderers make some of the best inmates.”
At one point, even Hayes yawns as he sits through the data being presented to try to save his life.
A psychiatrist with an office on Madison Avenue in New York talks about how Steven used to blame his younger brother for everything so Steven wouldn’t be the one to get beaten by their father. “It was a sad, horrible situation,” the doctor says. Hayes’s father, apparently, would make the boys go into a room and beat each other up to see who would get whipped. “This is sadistic,” he says. This doctor has interviewed Hayes extensively, and his testimony sometimes seems like a stand-in for that of Hayes himself, who isn’t taking the stand. For example, the witness reports that Hayes told him that the night before they broke into the Petit house, Komisarjevsky took him around to several other houses in Cheshire and broke in to them. He wanted to show Hayes how easy it was.
—
At 8:15 on the morning of November 1, the reporters are assembled in their customary line in the hall outside the courtroom, briefcases and backpacks snaking along the linoleum floor, in order. Judge Blue appears, grinning under his high cap of white hair, holding up a plastic Ziploc bag like it’s a fish he just caught. He announces to the reporters that he made chocolate-chip cookies yesterday, and they are welcome to have one if they like. The reporters smile nervously. It’s a bizarre but lovely gesture, and the cookies are better than average.
A couple of hours later, when everyone is settled in and waiting for the day to start, Blue makes an announcement. It seems that on the previous Friday afternoon one of the alternate jurors—there are only two left by this point—passed a note to one of the judicial marshals. The juror is a woman with spirals of dark curls; the marshal a man, well over six feet, brown hair, friendly face. Blue says that in the note the juror suggested “what I’m going to call an assignation, or a meeting.” The note, which Blue has in his possession, reads, “Sunday, 5 p.m., Side Street Grille, Hamden.”
She was asking the marshal out on a date.
The jurors, as everyone in the room has heard Blue instruct them at least twice a day for weeks, are not to discuss the case outside the courtroom, nor are they to associate with anyone connected to the case in any way. Holding this note, Blue tells the courtroom, “I’m a romantic at heart, but not in here.” Looking like a beleaguered high-school principal, he motions for the clerk to call the juror in. Alone, without the rest of the jury.
She walks in and is shown to the witness box. She sees the note. Her face is strawberry-red and she keeps covering it with her hands.
“If I could spare you the embarrassment, I would,” Blue says.
The juror finds her voice and offers weakly, “But you said as long as we don’t talk about the case—”
“Sure,” says Blue. “I also didn’t prohibit you from walking naked across the New Haven Green. But this was, excuse my French, a goddamned stupid thing to do.”
Nervous, incredulous laughter sneaks out all over the room—except from the two rows where the Petit family sits. They are not laughing, because this isn’t funny. Blue tells the juror that he is allowing her to remain on the jury in her role as an alternate. “What you did was certainly a matter of spectacular poor judgment,” he says. But, he concludes, he can’t see how it affects her impartiality, so she can remain.
Bill’s leg rockets up and down like a metronome as the woman slinks out of the room.
—
On November 4, the day the two sets of lawyers are scheduled to make their closing arguments, a cold, dismal rain beats down on New Haven. Today, the members of the jury will listen to the arguments, and they will go back into their deliberation room and decide, collectively, whether the first man to be brought to trial for the murders of Jennifer, Hayley, and Michaela Petit will be sentenced to life without the possibility of parole, or death. Today, Bill will move a day closer to the rest of his life.
Tom Ullmann places a slide on the overhead projector and squints up to make sure it’s straight. The jury watches Ullmann shuffle around and looks up at the screen to see what he wants to show them. When the image appears, a few of them scrunch their faces with incomprehension. Most stare blankly. Judge Blue leans on his elbows in front of him and peers up at the screen. Bill tilts his head toward the screen, as he has done so many times to see what new horror or indignity it will visit upon his eyes.
The image is a photograph of a man pushing a rock up a hill. It looks like Sisyphus. “When I first received this case when it came in the office, about a week later, having interviewed Mr. Hayes, I put this photo on my bulletin board,” Ullmann says, speaking like a professor in freshman English. “That’s Sisyphus”—as it turns out—“and Sisyphus is a Greek story—mythology about a person who was burdened and has to always push this rock to the top of the mountain, but he can never get to the top because by the time you get there, the angle of the mountain and the weight of the rock, it always rolls back down, and so you are always burdened with pushing that rock up. It’s an unrelenting and unforgiving burden. It’s only effective if you have a conscience. It preys on your mind and weighs heavily on your soul. Only Steven Hayes’s death can free him from that burden. That’s when he gets to the top of that mountain. Why would you want to relieve Steven Hayes of this burden?”
Ullmann’s argument hammers this one note. He contends in a smooth and even voice that for Hayes, life in a tiny prison cell, racked by remorse and suicidal thoughts, would be “a fate worse than death.” He compares Hayes to a sick horse that would need to be shot in the head to escape its misery. Don’t put Steven Hayes out of his misery, Ullmann pleads. Let him suffer. Alive.
And then, toward the end of his speech, he says this:
“Your Honor, may I have Mr. Hayes come up here for a moment?”
Hayes rises from his swivel chair and shuffles to the area in front of the jury box, standing slump-shouldered before his adjudicators. A new kind of tension sucks in the walls of the room. Hayes has been in this room every day, walking in each morning and walking out each afternoon. But now he is being presented almost as an exhibit. “This is a human being,” Ullmann says. “You may not like him, you may hate him, you may despise what he did in this case, but he’s not a rabid dog that needs to be put down….His greatest freedom is what you just saw occur, walking from that desk to here—that’s it.” The jurors s
tare at Hayes, or at Bill. Ullmann ends his argument, his last substantial words on the record in the case of State v. Hayes, by quoting Martin Luther King Jr.: “ ‘The ultimate measure of a person is not where they stand at moments of comfort and convenience, but where one stands at times of challenge and controversy.’ Where do you stand?”
Judge Blue is not one to let poignant moments linger, so as soon as Ullmann stops speaking, he asks Dearington to begin his closing argument. Compared with Ullmann’s smooth, big-picture, morally focused oration, Dearington’s thirty-minute presentation is mostly a jumbled mess. He spends most of it wandering through the minutiae of the evidence. The approach, in theory, continues what has been the state’s strategy all along: Stick to the facts without passion or prejudice, calmly elucidate the jury’s legal responsibilities, and by the end, the pile of facts will leave them with no choice but to find Hayes guilty and sentence him to death. It has seemed effective so far. Dearington comes across as a dry, wizened veteran, and Nicholson a straight shooter. But now Dearington is just confusing people. In this last-chance summation, he is missing an opportunity to nail this thing shut, sometimes nearly losing the jury to sleep as he meanders through the lawyerly details.
“The basis for the statutory mitigants apparently, and it’s up for you to decide—well, I withdraw that. The legal basis for the statutory mitigants are that the defendant’s mental capacity was significantly impaired but not to the point of rising to a defense, number one. Number two, the defendant’s ability to conform his conduct to the requirements of the law was significantly impaired, but not so impaired in either case as to constitute a defense to the case. And then there’s this third one….”
The jurors look lost. Dearington continues:
“Again, a nonstatutory mitigant, if you find one has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt, is not an automatic bar to the death penalty, to imposing the death—”
Here Judge Blue actually interjects, a rare move for a judge while a lawyer is in the middle of a closing argument in a titanic death-penalty trial.
“Nonstatutory mitigant need only be proven by a preponderance of the evidence, sir,” Blue says.
Dearington looks up. “Did I not say that?”
“You did not.”
“I stand—clearly, they need only be proven by a preponderance of the evidence. Now, here’s the statutory mitigants that are being suggested to you—and you will have a list of them. His bad childhood—”
“You are now talking about the nonstatutory mitigants?”
“Nonstatutory mitigants.”
“Which will be explained. Proceed,” Blue says.
“Now, getting back on track…”
The jury may not completely understand this exchange except to note that the judge had to step in and correct the lawyer, and that probably isn’t a good thing for the lawyer.
It’s not that what Dearington is saying isn’t true or logical or important. But the presentation is somewhat incoherent and technical, and if there’s one moment in the trial where he should want to be impassioned and clear, this is that moment. Not mired in nonstatutory mitigants for a half hour. He does get in some shots at the defense’s attempt to turn Hayes into a sympathetic character, and the avuncular Dearington’s efforts to dish out zingers are endearing.
“Sisyphus. Very interesting. I’m not sure of the connection in this case, because [in the image of Sisyphus on the projector] I don’t see a mask, I don’t see a gun, I don’t see a bucket of gasoline, I don’t see him breaking into a house….”
“I hasten to point out, there’s not necessarily a correlation between abusing drugs and committing violent crimes….”
“I assume most of us have not experienced such a childhood [as Hayes’s]. On the other hand, it doesn’t mean that everyone who is brought up in an unfavorable family situation turns into Steven Hayes….”
Toward the end of Dearington’s drifting monologue, Blue pipes in again, this time saying flatly, “You have five minutes remaining.” It almost seems as if he’s trying to help Dearington out, reminding him that he has a mere five minutes in which to inject some life into his summation.
In his last five minutes, Dearington rushes through the more emotional part of his argument. He sounds vaguely panicked. But then, at the very end, he pauses, inhales and exhales, and picks up three unmarked manila folders from the table, the same manila folders that hold the same horrible photographs the jurors were asked to pass among each other in some of the worst moments of the trial. He does not open them. He just holds them. “I know you know what’s in these three folders,” he says. He turns to look for a moment at the projection screen, which shows a radiant photograph of Bill, Jennifer, Hayley, and Michaela. He motions to the screen and says, “That’s how they looked the evening before, when they were sitting down for supper with Dr. Petit.” He turns to the jury again, still clutching the manila folders. “And I know you’ve seen what’s in these folders. And you know how they were left by this defendant.”
It is masterful.
—
Bill is trying every day to claw his way back into a world he’s not even sure he wants to live in. The end of the world visited a loving family in a small Connecticut town one night, and he alone survived it. Damaged almost beyond repair, but alive. Still, he decided soon afterward that the only thing his wife and daughters would want him to do is to go on, and so he is going on. Life abides. Life wants to live, and he is doing his best to live it, against some of the impulses in his brain. He has thought of suicide—of course he has. He has had all the thoughts. Guilt. The wish that he had died in that fire.
But he has decided to live, because life abides.
And yet at every turn, it seems that the end of the world was not enough for Bill Petit to have to endure. It’s not going to be that easy. For three years, he endured the aftermath, propped up by Hanna and Ron and his parents and entire towns of people. He was, slowly, regaining his strength, resuscitating parts of himself that had almost slipped away. But this trial. This trial has beat him down again—a slow, plodding assault on what’s left of him. It has introduced new horrors to his fragile mind, incited new outrage in his bruised heart. It has deepened the wounds. We all hope for a clean break when there is something in our past we want to leave behind—some accident, some betrayal we’re trying to live down, some illness we have overcome, some mistake we can’t unmake but spend our days trying to erase. But this trial, and the second one looming next year, is like a scab being ripped off. Did he have to attend the trial? Not legally, no. There was no formal obligation. But yes, he did, because it’s a small thing he can do to make it up to his wife and daughters that he couldn’t be there for them. A small thing he can do to help bring the men who killed them to justice.
And so right now, he is sitting flipping through a magazine in a small, windowless room, an unused office appropriated for him and his family, where they wait for twelve strangers united only by the fact that they all live in New Haven County to decide whether to kill or not to kill the first man. He wanders back into the claustrophobic courtroom, whose center is oddly dim while fluorescent bulbs light up its hexagonal circumference, as if the room were the base of a spaceship. Reporters sit on the floor, swiping their smartphone screens. A man pulls a novel out of his backpack and reads. A woman answers her cell phone but is ushered out by one of the marshals, who stand sentry at every exit. People pass gum and mints and do crosswords. Bill’s handheld device is the kind you don’t see much anymore, the kind that requires a stylus. He pokes and scribbles on it, sitting in his regular seat in the front of the public gallery. He can’t think about why he’s here. Why he’s trapped here on this stupid uncomfortable bench instead of taking a patient’s blood pressure in his office on Whiting Street, then calling Jen to check in about dinner, then picking up Michaela over at the Poissons’, then reminding Hayley that the first UConn game of the season is next weekend up in Storrs. When one of his neighbors or an uncle or friend
walks by, almost out of habit they give his shoulder a squeeze. He turns his head just a little each time, never letting these quick expressions of love go unacknowledged. There’s a snack bar downstairs, run by a friendly blind man named Dave. Dave sells candy and chips and drinks and even cooks bacon and toasts toast and makes hot sandwiches. Heck of nice guy, Dave. You have to tell him how much money you’re handing him. Bill tries not to snack too much, but sometimes the family gets lunch from Dave, partly to avoid facing the reporters and onlookers and the occasional anti-death-penalty protester outside. This waiting is awful. One morning, the jury had to start its deliberations twenty-five minutes late because one of the jurors couldn’t find a place to park. Another time, Bill was sitting in the family waiting room with the door open and overheard a reporter in the hall answer his phone and say loudly, “Hi. Good. I’m bored, but I’m good.” The jury deliberates all weekend, Saturday and Sunday both. On Saturday, word comes from their sanctum that they don’t want to break for lunch at the appointed hour. Maybe they’re close! Bill stands against the wall, hands folded behind his back, chatting quietly with Jen’s dad. But nothing comes of it. Fifteen minutes later, the jury breaks for lunch. On Sunday, you can hear feverish bursts of clapping from inside their room, but nothing comes of that, either. What everyone on the outside is listening for is a knock. That signals…something. Could be anything. A knock on the door means the jury might have a procedural question or might need some testimony read back to them or might be hungry. Or they might have reached their decision.
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