The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Prosecutor leaves courtroom, but will never forget Cheshire murders
During the tense, emotionally draining days of “the Cheshire trials” in 2010 and 2011, state prosecutor Gary Nicholson often tried to lighten things up by joking with me outside the courtroom about the supposed strengths of “his” Boston Red Sox vs. the alleged weaknesses of “my” New York Yankees.
Nicholson did this again last Wednesday after I observed him in court for his final appearance, the sentencing of Brandon Webb to four years in prison for first-degree assault in a brutal fight outside a Meriden bar.
“Not a great result for your Yankees last night!” he teased with his usual sly grin. (The Sox had defeated the Yankees the night before but the Yankees went on to clobber their rivals, 8-0 and 9-1, in the next two games.)
Nicholson will have more time to watch baseball now, and he has earned that rest. After 37 years of prosecuting cases, he has retired at age 66.
“The time was right for me,” he said of his decision. “And I guess I was hoping it might save somebody else’s job, with the (state) budget situation.”
I will miss him, and so will many other people in the New Haven Superior Court building. He was impossibly good-natured, affable and unruffled, no matter how horrendous were the cases in which he was immersed.
How could a crime be much worse than what happened to the Petit family 10 years ago on a July morning?
At about 3 a.m., Dr. William Petit Jr. was violently awakened as he slept on a couch in the downstairs sunroom, by blows to his head from a baseball bat wielded by Joshua Komisarjevsky.
Then Komisarjevsky and Steven Hayes brought Petit to the basement and tied him to a pipe. After that they terrorized his wife, Jennifer Hawke-Petit, and their daughters, Michaela, 11, and Hayley, 17, by binding them to their beds while the perpetrators looked for money and jewelry.
The home invasion and torture ended at about 10 a.m. after Hayes had raped and strangled Hawke-Petit. One of the invaders set fire to the house, with the girls still lying helpless in their beds.
Komisarjevsky and Hayes ran into a roadblock set up by Cheshire police but it was too late to save the girls. Petit had managed to free himself shortly before the fire erupted and he crawled to a neighbor’s house, pleading for somebody to save his family.
Hayes was the first to be put on trial, in September 2010. New Haven State’s Attorney Michael Dearington, who has also retired, and Senior Assistant State’s Attorney Nicholson prosecuted the case. They sought the death penalty.
In the Hayes trial and the one for Komisarjevsky a year later, the prosecutors were successful. They convinced the juries that each man had committed multiple crimes, including murder. And in the second phase of each trial, they persuaded the jurors that each defendant deserved to be executed.
But in 2012 the Connecticut legislature and Gov. Dannel P. Malloy abolished the death penalty for future murders, leaving it in place for Hayes, Komisarjevsky and nine other men on Death Row. The Connecticut Supreme Court in 2015 ruled it wasn’t fair to execute those men in light of the changed law. Hayes and Komisarjevsky subsequently were resentenced to multiple life terms, with no possibility of release.
As the New Haven Register’s court reporter, I sat through every day of those terrible trials, watching Nicholson, Dearington and two sets of defense attorneys: New Haven Public Defender Thomas Ullmann, Patrick Culligan, Walter Bansley III, Jeremiah Donovan and Todd Bussert.
The worst part of it all was seeing the crime scene photos, the memory of which is something I, and anybody else who saw them, will take to our graves.
But I needed to see them just once. Nicholson and the other attorneys looked at them many times.
“I have a daughter who was the same age at the time as Michaela,” Nicholson told me as we spoke in his office last week. “You think to yourself: ‘That could have been my daughter.’”
He noted, “For a lot of us in this business, many times the victims or defendants have put themselves in situations where they end up in court. But the Petits were just like anybody else; they were in their own home, minding their own business, doing what we all do. Suddenly it happened. These were completely innocent victims.”
The toll of dealing with violent crime cases probably made it easier for Nicholson to decide he had had enough.
“It just comes to a point where you realize you need to get on with your own personal life,” he said. “You see the worst side of people. And you reach a point where you want to move on to a place where you’re not dealing with that worst side.”
Nicholson admitted, “Yes, that (Cheshire) case had the most effect on me personally, because of the circumstances and because of what was at stake.”
He and Dearington saw their working hours — and supposed off-time — dominated by the Cheshire cases from July 2007 through the end of the second trial. “It was something we lived with for years,” Nicholson noted.
He said he had never been “a big proponent of the death penalty. But I did feel it was appropriate in certain circumstances. Cheshire was one of them.”
Nicholson confirmed that the attorneys for each defendant had offered to have them plead guilty and in return receive sentences of life in prison with no chance for parole. This would have avoided the trials and the trauma involved for everyone, especially the extended Petit family.
But Nicholson told me: “After consulting with the Petits and given our view of the case and what those two men had done and considering the other inmates who had been convicted and were on death row, we just didn’t feel it would be fair” not to seek the death penalty.
When I asked what he had learned from the job, Nicholson said he had become more safety-conscious for his family and friends. He added, “When you think you’ve seen it all, you realize you’ve never seen it all. You ask yourself: ‘How could somebody do something like that?’”
As for suggestions about criminal justice reform, he said the one-year mandatory minimum sentence for gun possession should be increased, “so people will think twice about walking around with one.” He declined to specify what that increased mandatory minimum should be.
A lifelong Connecticut resident and a Branford homeowner, Nicholson is now thinking about retiring to Florida. He cited the tax rates here, saying, “That doesn’t make it easy for people who’ve retired.”
Yes, he looks forward to “puttering around the house.” And he remarked with that familiar sly smile, “I do have more time to watch the Red Sox and Yankees!”
“Yes, that (Cheshire) case had the most effect on me personally, because of the circumstances and because of whatwasat stake. — Senior Assistant State’s Attorney Gary Nicholson