New Information Surfaces about 2007 Petit Family Murders

New developments in the 2007 Petit family home invasion have recently hit the media.

The attorney hired for Joshua Komisarjevsky claims to the Supreme Court that the trial in 2007 should not have been held in New Haven, because it ruined the client’s chances of receiving a fair trial.

According to the Hartford Courant, roughly seventy percent of the New Haven population was closely following the case at the time of the trial, so a majority of the possible jurors would hold a bias against the case.

John Holdridge, representing Komisarjevsky, said that the case being in New Haven really put a strain on Connecticut’s justice system.

It showed through numerous hurting people that it was rigged against the defense from the start of the trial.

The reason for the new appeal in 2017 is on grounds of new evidence that wasn’t disclosed to the defense during the initial trial.

There were various recorded phone calls to dispatch on the day of the murders that remained unseen.

There were 41 total calls reported, including calls from SWAT officers that were informed to not respond to the distress call on Sorghum Mill Road.

There was also a call from an officer who was only one minute away from the Bank of America where Hawke-Petit was forced by Hayes to withdraw $15,000.

This new information could be helpful or detrimental to the case, though only time will tell. Meanwhile, the town still remembers the trauma from that day and struggles with it twelve years later as new information is brought to light.

Oddly enough, Holdridge didn’t spend any time talking about the newly found phone calls to the trial judge.

Instead, he spent almost all of his forty-five minutes arguing that there should have been a change of venue due to the staggering prejudice within the jury pool in New Haven.

Holdridge recommended that the trial should have been moved to Stamford Connecticut, where a bit less than fifty percent of the population was closely following the case.

However, this would only have helped so much. Holdridge also mentioned that Hayes had already been convicted the year before, in 2010.