Just Desserts

Justice, Not Vengeance

A man convicted of killing three members of a Connecticut family in a brutal 2007 home invasion should die for the crime, jurors decided Monday after nearly 18 hours of deliberation.

Steven Hayes, 47, was convicted last month of 16 of the 17 charges against him, including nine counts of murder and capital murder and four counts of kidnapping. Jennifer Hawke-Petit, 48, and her daughters, 17-year-old Hayley Petit and 11-year-old Michaela Petit, died in the attack.

Prosecutors alleged that Hayes and Joshua Komisarjevsky invaded the Petit home in Cheshire, Connecticut, on July 23, 2007, beat Dr. William Petit, raped and strangled his wife, molested one of the daughters and set the house on fire. 

I've posted before (here and here) about this particular crime. I just cannot comprehend the brutality, heinousness, and wanton disregard of anything remotely resembling empathy or humanity. 

Michaela was an 11-year-old girl -- tortured and killed in her own bedroom, surrounded by stuffed animals.

My daughter is 14. It wasn't that long ago that she was 11 and slept with a ginormous pile of stuffed animals. When I slipped into her room to check on her before I went to bed she had usually burrowed down to the bottom of the pile. That's one of the fondest, strongest images I have of her.

The defense attorney, speaking of the defendant, said "he isn't a rabid dog that needs to be put to death."

I agree with that statement. It's an affront to rabid dogs everywhere. They have a sickness that compels them to behave in a certain way. They literally cannot help themselves. These sick fucks, on the other hand, made a series of cold, calculating, premeditated decisions that resulted in the horrific deaths of a mother and her two daughters. 

I heard a radio interview with the father. He put things in a way that I'd never heard before, but that I thought did a pretty good job of capturing and explaining what he was going through. To the best of my recollection it went something like this.

"This (the death penalty) smooths the edges of the hole in my soul, but that hole will never go away. It will be with me always."