The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Killer gets approval to ask state’s high court for new trial
HARTFORD — One of the two men convicted of the brutal 2007 home invasion and slayings of a Cheshire mother and her two daughters will be granted the right to argue to the state Supreme Court next month that he deserves a new trial, according to court documents.
State high court documents show lawyers for Joshua Komisarjevsky will be in court at 11 a.m. Oct. 17 to argue in part that their client is entitled to a new trial because he can “show that actual prejudice affected the jury.”
“In addition, the defendant claims that the state violated Brady v. Maryland, 373 U.S. 83 (1963), which requires that the prosecution disclose to the defense all evidence that might exonerate the defendant, by failing to disclose 132 pages of letters written by his codefendant, Steven Hayes, and six recordings of police communications from the date of the incident,” documents show. This story was first reported by the Hartford Courant.
Komisarjevsky and Steven Hayes were convicted on multiple charges, including murder, in the deaths of Jennifer Hawke-Petit and her daughters, Michaela, 11, and Hayley, 17. Hawke-Petit was raped and strangled in her home, shortly before a fire spread by gasoline engulfed the house, killing the girls, who had been tied to their beds.
Their father, Dr. William Petit Jr., was assaulted with a baseball bat as the home invasion began and was tied up in the basement. He was able to escape to seek help at about the time the fire broke out. He is now a state representative, but did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday regarding the state Supreme Court’s ruling.
Komisarjevsky and Hayes both received the death penalty, but that was overturned when the state eliminated this as a possibility. Both are now serving life sentences.
News that the state’s high court has chosen to hear arguements from Komisarjevsky’s attorneys seeking a new trial didn’t sit well with state Rep. Liz Linehan, who lives in Cheshire and whose 103rd District includes the neighborhood where the Petit murders occurred.
“It’s a shame this is happening,” Linehan said Tuesday. “It’s a waste of the taxpayers’ money. He was found guilty and he is guilty.”
Further, Komisarjevsky’s lawyers argue that the “extensive pretrial publicity surrounding the case aroused the passions of the community and prejudiced potential jurors against him and that this is an extreme case where prejudice should be presumed because the crime was so infamous and the adverse publicity so inflammatory that it was impossible to select an impartial jury in New Haven.”
The lawyers contend that, even if prejudice were not presumed, the prosecution failed to “disclose to the defense all evidence that might exonerate the defendant.”
Also, the lawyers maintain Komisarjevsky was “denied his right to a fair trial before an impartial jury when the trial court denied his requests that the trial be moved from the judicial district of New Haven to the judicial district of Stamford-Norwalk,” documents show.
Komisarjevsky also “argues that the evidence would have supported his defense theories that he lacked the intent to kill the victims and that Cheshire police officers, due to their feelings of guilt and embarrassment regarding their inadequate response to the incident, were motivated to undermine the veracity of the exculpatory statements that the defendant made while in their custody,” according to court documents.
The state Supreme Court site also notes that among the defendant’s other claims on appeal are that: “the trial court abused its discretion in denying his challenges for cause of twelve jurors, the trial court abused its discretion in denying his motions to open the evidence, for a continuance and for a mistrial in light of the state’s untimely disclosure of Hayes’ letters, and he was denied his right to a fair trial when the state presented testimony and argument at trial that it knew or should have known was false or misleading.”
Cheshire police had surrounded the house during the home invasion but remained out of sight after a bank official in the town notified them Hawke-Petit had been at the bank to withdraw $15,000 and had reported to a teller about the unfolding crime. Hayes, who was waiting in a car outside the bank, then drove back to the house with her.
In 2014, after Komisarjevsky’s trial, other recordings of police calls from that day were discovered in a Town Hall storage cabinet. They were turned over to prosecutors and defense attorneys.
The eight calls include one in which Cheshire police Capt. Robert Vignola said he would do a drive-by of the Petit house at 300 Sorghum Mill Drive; a communication between Cheshire police Detective Kerry Nastri and Connecticut State Trooper David Devito; and a communication between Vignola and Capt. Ren Marchand, the shift commander.