Convicted Cheshire Killer Takes Step Forward In Bid For New Trial

Convicted Cheshire killer Joshua Komisarjevsky’s bid for a new trial for the 2007 home invasion murders may have taken a step forward when a Superior Court judge ruled that his defense attorneys didn’t receive three police recordings from the morning of the killings.

The Hartford Court reports that Judge Jon Blue’s ruling will now become part of Komisarjevsky’s appeal before the state Supreme Court which could be filed next month.

Komisarjevsky is claiming that the fact the some previously undisclosed Cheshire police dispatch tapes from the morning of the murders warrants a new trial.

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Blue, who presided over the original trials of Komisarjevsky and Steven Hayes, said the failure to disclose the calls showed no wrongdoing by prosecutors but was the result of human error, according to the Courant.

Randall Beach of the New Haven Register reports that Blue’s task in Tuesday’s hearing wasn’t to rule on whether Komisarjevsky deserved a new trail but just to decide whether the evidence showed that his attorneys didn’t receive the data of the three phone calls before or during the trial.

The content of the calls, according to the Register, included a SWAT team member being told to “stand down” and not come to the police department; another was of a hostage negotiator being told not to respond; and the third was a Cheshire police officer questioning Jennifer Hawke-Petit’s statement to a bank teller that her family was being held hostage.

The Courant reports that Komisarjevsky’s defense attorneys are raising the issue of whether Cheshire police responded appropriately and if some of the tragedy may have not occurred if the response was handled differently.

Komisarjevsky and Hayes were both convicted, in separate trials, with felony murder and sentenced to death for the 2007 killings of Hawke-Petit and Michaela, 11, and Hayley, 17.

State lawmakers got rid of the death penalty in 2012, but made it so that inmates already on death row would be executed. The provision was added after the trials of Hayes and Komisarjevsky.

However, the Connecticut State Supreme Court ruled last August that the death penalty violates the state’s constitution and barred all executions.

Hayes asked a judge in November to vacate his death sentence and to impose a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Read more about Tuesday’s court hearing at the Hartford Courant here and the New Haven Register here.