NEW HAVEN, Conn. — Go ahead. Kill him. Make his day.
Defense lawyers are using reverse psychology in asking jurors to spare the life of home invasion monster Steven Hayes, the murderer of a Connecticut nurse and her two daughters.
Hayes, a 47-year-old career burglar, is having such a guilt-wracked, miserable time living “like an animal” in his “isolation cell,” that the death penalty would actually be a blessing, argued defense lawyer Thomas Ullmann.
Jurors begin deliberating tomorrow whether Hayes lives or dies for raping and strangling Jennifer Hawke-Petit, 48, and for helping burn alive her daughters, Hayley, 17, and Michaela, 11, during a break-in in their four-bedroom Colonial in a wealthy suburb north of New Haven three years ago.
“If you want to end his misery, you should execute him,” the lawyer told jurors in closing arguments this morning.
“If you want to end his overwhelming guilt and anguish about this case you should end his life…Kill him — that would be the easy way out.”
The defense says Hayes deserves a break — a sentence of life without parole — because he’s truly sorry for having raped and strangled the mother, crimes he’s blaming on his history of crack abuse and child abuse.
“He’s not a rabid dog that needs to be put down,” Ullmann insisted.
He’s also claiming that his yet-tried co-defendant, Joshua Komisarjevsky, 29, was the real mastermind of the crime, and was solely responsible for setting the daughters on fire as they lay tied to their beds.
Not so, prosecutor Gary Nicholson, told jurors, speaking of the family’s 7-hour ordeal of robbery, kidnapping, rape and murder, in his own arguments, which cap nearly two months of testimony in New Haven Superior Court.
“Make no mistake about it,” Nicholson said. “The violence, the destruction, and the deaths that the members of the Petit family were put through was a joint effort,” he said.
“He could have left anytime he wanted,” the prosecutor said of Hayes.
All three deaths were depraved, heinous and cruel — thereby meeting the legal standard for the death penalty, the prosecutor said.
“In her last moments on this earth, as the defendant’s hands were around her neck, choking the life out of her, what was on Mrs. Petit’s mind?” he asked.
“She was thinking about her family… her daughters … What were the defendants going to do to them?”
As for the girls, who were literally burned alive, “The girls had gas poured right on them,” the prosecutor told jurors.
“I’ve already said it once, I’m going to say it again. Those girls knew they were about to suffer a horrible, painful death. Were they screaming? Were they begging for their lives? Use your common sense. Of course they were.”
Hayes’ brother, Matthew, of Seattle, is sitting in the audience — the first family member to come to court in his support.
Matthew, who soon after the slaughters told authorities “The family of this monster will have to live with this forever,” and “Steven is alone,” is sitting two rows behind his brother.
Closings by both sides are expected to last the morning. This afternoon, the judge will instruct jurors on the law governing their death penalty deliberations, which will begin Friday morning.