In some 200 pages of pretrial motions filed today, Connecticut home invasion monster Joshua Komisarjevsky takes shot after shot at surviving victim Dr. William Petit — including demanding that Petit and all other witnesses in the case be sequestered, presumably in a hotel, throughout a capital trial that begins next month and is likely to span the bulk of this year.
Komisarjevsky also demands that his own seat in the courtroom be moved, to permit “an unimpeded, unobstructed and uncluttered ‘face-to-face’ confrontation with the witnesses against him,” Petit prime among them.
Komisarjevsky is charged with beating Petit — a prominent Cheshire, CT endocrinologist — nearly to death in his family room with a baseball bat, then joining with co-defendant Steven Hayes in a night of rape, torture and arson. Only Petit survived.
In November, Hayes was convicted and sentenced to death in the July, 2007 atrocity, which left Jennifer Hawke-Petit raped and strangled, and 11-year-old Michaela and 17-year-old Hayley dead of smoke inhalation after being tied to their beds, doused with gas and set on fire.
Jury selection for Komisarjevsky — described by prosecutors as the murders’ mastermind, and who, like Hayes, was caught fleeing the burning house — begins March 14.
As if his requests to sequester and then stare down the only survivor is not enough, Komisarjevsky’s motions also demand that Petit’s relatives and friends — who he repeatedly sneers at in the papers as the “Petit posse” — be barred from wearing memorial pins and that the number of seats reserved for them in court be moved further from the jury and reduced from two rows to one.
The papers even make a passing swipe at “Dr. Petit’s never-ending and purposefully publicized complaints about our system of justice,” a reference to the doctor’s public criticisms of the lengthy trial process.
Komisarjevsky’s other demands include that the trial be moved from New Haven to Stamford, that Superior Court Judge Jon Blue be removed from the case due to a “lack of objectivity,” and that the capital charges be dismissed because he didn’t kill the mother and didn’t intend the girls to die. Blue has yet to decide the motions.
