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Betsy Burbank cried as the verdict that she and her fellow jurors agreed on was read out loud in court Monday. It wasn’t the first time she’d broken into tears over the last four days.
Most mornings for the past eight weeks, Burbank, a 45-year-old interior designer and divorced mother of two sons, saw her son Sam off to school, then walked from her Humphrey Street home to the Church Street courthouse to consider the fate of one of two men accused of committing a triple murder.
She and her fellow jurors found Steven Hayes guilty of in the 2007 murders of Jennifer Hawke-Petit, and her daughters Hayley and Michaela at their Cheshire home in a particularly brutal attack that riveted the attention of the region. In relative terms, that was the simple part.
For four days, starting last Friday, they weighed whether to give Hayes the death penalty — a measure Burbank philosophically opposes. Monday afternoon they delivered their answer: yes.
At some point each of those four days, Burbank found herself in tears.
“I thought he deserved the death penalty for his crimes, but I have empathy for him. I didn’t relish it,” Burbank explained during an extensive interview in her home Monday night, during which she seemed exhaustedand emotionally spent. She said she believes the death penalty is imposed disproportionately to racial minorities and low-income defendants; that’s why she opposes it. But she said that she and the other jurors were “open-minded and determined to understand the law and base their decision on the facts” and not on their emotions.
There was no vengeance involved either, she added.
Tuesday morning, while many of her fellow jurors were planning to take a limo ride to New York to appear on “Good Morning America,” Burbank planned to spend the day decompressing with some old Alfred Hitchcock movies. The group bonded during the shared experience of deciding whether another person deserved to live.
“Spiritual” “War” Experience
Burbank said that each juror was attentive and professional. They went through “phases” while getting to know each other.
She was labeled the “etiquette police.” She admonished her cohorts for wearing jeans to court and for storing candy on the juror railing during the trial. Camaraderie developed, but not immediately. When they had to listen to and hear each other during deliberations, their bond tightened. By the end they “became spiritual because of all we went through in coming to this conclusion,” Burbank said.
They spent many hours in the bright deliberating room with a “great view of New Haven.” Jurors routinely brought in food for each other. They teased each other, sometimes argued, and talked sports. (Well, at least the men did.)
They became a sort of family. “It was like going through a war together,” explained Burbank.
Burbank did not want to speak for the other jurors. She did describe the deliberations during the sentencing phase as the hardest part of the entire trial. By then “we knew the girls [Jennifer, Hayley, and Michaela] so well — we felt we knew them and the family and the loss.”
Despite her reservations about the death penalty, she considered herself a strong and objective person. But as soon as deliberating started, “I realized just how hard it is to give the death penalty to someone.”
She said she hopes that this sentence will be a message to the next jury, the one that will decide the fate of Hayes’ co-defendant, Joshua Komisarjevsky, who will stand trial next year for his role in the 2007 murders and arson of the Petit home in Cheshire.
“Hayes is anti-social,” she said, but Komisarjevsky “is evil.” She plans to attend his trial because she feels invested in seeing this through to the end.
Burbank gave a great deal of credit to Thomas Ullmann, Hayes’ defense attorney, whom she described as “brilliant the whole way through.”
“He is a great lawyer, direct and provocative,” she said. She wondered, however, if it was wise for Ullmann to prompt Hayes to stand before the jury during his closing argument. Hayes ended up looking flat and not particularly remorseful, she said.
Burbank also described Eric Goldsmith, the forensic psychiatrist who interviewed Hayes for more than 30 hours over a year and a half, as an “excellent witness.”
But in the end she couldn’t reconcile the version Goldsmith provided of Hayes’ extreme emotional disturbance that immediately preceded his killing of Hawke-Petit with the statement Hayes gave to Detective Anthony Buglione.
Buglione interviewed Hayes shortly after his arrest on July 23, 2007. For Burbank, Buglione’s testimony was critical: He said that Hayes mentioned nothing about becoming enraged at statements Komisarjevsky supposedly made to him, after he returned from the bank with Hawke-Petit that morning, about William Petit and the girls being dead, But he did tell the detective that, after returning, he noticed Michaela had changed her clothes. The jury spent some time reviewing that testimony. Ultimately, Burbank opined, “You can’t say two opposite things – they both can’t be true.”
The introduction of Matthew Hayes’ letters by the defense, Burbank added, may have put a “nail in the coffin” for Hayes with regard to her fellow jurors. She called Matthew’s first letter “damning.” He wrote that his brother didn’t deserve any mercy because he is never accountable for his actions. That resonated deeply with many of the other jurors, she said.
Burbank said she felt empathy for Hayes. “You can’t quantify child abuse and say one person’s response is right and one is wrong. [Hayes’] coping mechanism of anti-social behavior, of getting away with things and avoiding responsibility … his parents created that,” she argued.
San Quentin Days
With a master’s of education degree in counseling psychology, Burbank came to this jury with a background as a former therapist at a boot-camp style prison program run by the California Department of Corrections. In her early 20s, she spent two years counseling first-time felons at the maximum-security prison at San Quentin. Her experience there caused her to be “skeptical about the Department of Corrections” in general.
That mattered at one key point in the trial, During the trial, Ullmann claimed that if Hayes were to receive a life sentence without the possibility of parole, he would not be integrated into the general prison population for a very long time. Burbank said she doubted that was true. Burbank felt that, with good behavior, Hayes would eventually be transferred to the general population in a matter of a few years and he would be comfortable there. For her, that argument “worked totally against the defense.”
After the verdicts were read and the family gave statements to the press Monday afternoon, the entire Petit clan moved down to the basement of the courthouse to thank the 12 jurors for their service. Amidst talking and hugging, the jurors were able to “give our condolences” to the Petit and Hawke families “To see the strength and stoicism every day – to stay together united in their grief and loss was inspiring,” Burbank said about the families.
“Right now, I feel really calm and content with what we did. But that is because we took so much time making sure we understood the law and how to interpret it,” she said. “Everyone had to go through their own process. We had to get real … in a way that wasn’t emotional.”
But, she added, “I got emotional, I cried, because it’s so difficult” to decide that someone should die for their crimes.