Paul Bass Photo
John Lively at his Westville home.
A request to speak privately with the judge in the Petit murder trial led to a juror’s dismissal — and, the juror says, to an unfair public drubbing.
The juror, retired magazine editor John Lively, at first decided to avoid speaking publicly after Judge Jon C. Blue dismissed him last Tuesday from the New Haven courtroom where Steven Hayes is on trial for the brutal 2007 murders of Jennifer Petit and her daughters in Cheshire.
Then Lively found himself pilloried as a “craven creep” shirking his public duty, he said. So now he wants to tell his side of what happened.
He told it Sunday in an emotional interview with the Independent in the living room of his Westville home.
“The accusations and the vitriol are getting out of hand,” he said, referring to news coverage and unscreened reader comments posted on the New Haven Register website, which compared him to defendant Hayes. “There are all these people who think I’m a craven creep for [supposedly] concocting an excuse to interrupt the court and get off jury duty.”
He also took exception to a front-page characterization of his having “quit” the Petit jury “in a huff.”
“I didn’t quit. I wasn’t in a huff,” he said. “I read a statement under duress. And I left when I was dismissed. I was prepared to serve on that jury.”
It was his determination to fulfill that duty, he said, that led to all the trouble in the first place.
Death Penalty Challenge
Lively, who’s 65, has a salt-and-pepper beard and a deliberate manner. He retains a trace of the accent of his native Chattanooga, Tennessee, where his grandfather, also named John Lively, was a “sessions court” judge, he said. He father became a lawyer, as did his sister. He opted out of the law, pursuing a career in publishing instead. He edited the magazine Fine Homebuilding. He eventually became editor-in-chief of the company that publishes the magazine, Taunton Press. He retired in November 2005 after 26 years at the company.
He spent some time in courtrooms in the South in his youth, but not since, he said. He had never served on a jury when his turn came in January of 2010. He didn’t know much about how trials work, he said.
After he was named to a pool of potential jurors to be questioned by attorneys, he learned what case he’d been called for: the Petit case. He hadn’t heard much about the murders; he and his wife had been in France when they occurred in 2007. And they don’t follow local newspapers or local TV news.
He learned more about the case at the courthouse that day. “I was obviously shocked that I was in a case that was so important, that was such a high-profile case, and it involved such brutality, such cruelty. I thought, ‘This is going to be a different thing to deal with,’” Lively recalled.
During voir dire, both the prosecutor and the defense attorney asked him if he’d be able to handle viewing gruesome evidence and still fairly evaluate the case. He said he would.
He was asked if he favors the death penalty. “I hadn’t made up my mind yet” on the issue, he said. “I didn’t have a ready answer.”
He was the first juror chosen. The case wasn’t going to begin until September. He and his wife returned to France for three months. Lively was told he couldn’t read about the case; he wasn’t supposed to read books on the death penalty, either.
“I thought and I prayed” in preparation, he said. “I thought about it a lot.”
Back home in New Haven, he learned to avert his eyes from Register vending boxes so as not to come across Petit case headlines, he said.
“The thing that was most difficult for me was knowing that the crux of the case was deciding life or death,” he said. “Who’s the death penalty in service of? Is it punishment for the criminal? Is it closure and satisfaction for the victim? Is it to rid society of a known menace? These are complex considerations. I knew that was going to be a challenge. I really felt like I had a social responsibility to do this [sit on the jury]. I knew it was going to be difficult. I knew a lot of people didn’t want to do this. I was committed.”
Seeking Context
The trial began last Monday. Lively and his fellow jurors had received detailed instructions from the judge. The case quickly went from brief opening statements right into presentation of evidence — and Lively felt he needed more instructions.
By Tuesday morning, he found himself struggling to figure out where State’s Attorney Michael Dearington was headed with slow-paced questioning about a baseball bat, a purse, and other physical evidence found at the scene.
“I’m struck within the first several hours by how casual the prosecuting attorney is, how casual his manner and demeanor are and how overly deliberate,” Lively recalled. “There were huge long pauses as he would move from one question to the next. Often the question was repeated. It was taking what seemed to me an extra long time to present evidence.”
He kept wondering what the “context” was for the evidence; “I was finding it difficult to connect the dots. It was becoming difficult for me to make any kind of judgment about the authenticity of the evidence or the testimony … He produced this bat. It came out of a tube. There was a lot of discussion about the exhibit number of the bat.” Lawyers had similar discussion about other pieces of evidence, including diagrams of the Petit house, the neighborhood, and neighbors’ houses.
“My training [as an editor] has taught me to give the reader an overall impression of what’s going on, then to present the pieces of [evidence]. If you understand what’s going on, you can make evaluations of the evidence. Is this evidence important? Does it really matter about the contents of this purse? Where is this going?”
A Hand Raised
As the lunch hour approached Tuesday morning, Lively said, he had the sense that fellow jurors felt as frustrated as he did, although they didn’t discuss the matter. He decided he needed help.
William Petit, the surviving father and husband of those killed in the attacks, was on the stand. He wasn’t speaking; the judge and the attorneys were speaking in a sidebar about the evidence. Lively raised his hand. A marshal noticed. The marshal signaled to the judge, who looked at Lively.
Lively asked to be excused from the room. The jurors had been told to do that when they need a break, to go to the bathroom, say. The judge called a five-minute recess.
Then Lively told the court clerk he had a problem. The two repaired to the deliberation room right off Courtroom 6A; the other jurors retired to the jury room down the hall.
“I told her [the clerk] I was having a tough time following the presentation of evidence, that it seemed the prosecutor acts like this is a done deal and doesn’t have to work hard to prove anything. It seems disrespectful.”
The clerk told him to wait a moment. She returned and asked if he’d be willing to “tell all this to the judge,” Lively said.
He said OK. He said he needed “advice” so he could figure out how to “serve effectively.” The clerk said the judge wanted him to address the court about his concerns.
“I was completely taken aback,” Lively recalled. He said he didn’t want to do that; he wanted to speak privately to the judge. He said he was told that because it was “open proceeding,” he had to speak in open court.
The jurors returned to the courtroom. Testimony proceeded for a few minutes. Then Judge Blue declared a lunch recess — and announced that Lively would address open court upon his return.
A Speech
Lively walked out onto Church Street in a “daze,” he said. He was nervous. He walked into Judies European Bakery on Grove Street, decided he didn’t feel hungry. He crossed the street to Willoughby’s and ordered an oatmeal cookie and a black coffee. He sat down. He put his thoughts down on a page and a quarter of notebook paper. He didn’t want to speak in open court. But he also felt he had no choice. He wanted to have the right words ready.
Returning to court, Lively was worried. “I didn’t want to get off” the jury, he said. He had two thoughts in mind. One: “I’m in trouble.” Or two: Maybe, just maybe, the judge “sympathized with my views and he wanted me to be heard.”
He read his written statement to the court:
“As a juror in this case I am confused by the presentation of the state’s case and bewildered by what seems to me to be a lack of preparation.
“The physical evidence is poorly organized and the order of its introduction seems arbitrary and casual. But what is worse, the evidence is being presented to us with no explanation or contextualization.
“It’s as though the state expects jurors to have prior awareness of the circumstances of the case, which I do not, except in its barest outline. I find all the fumbling around with the evidence and its cataloging the presentation of disconnected particulars and the halting, desultory approach — all these things keep me from being fully able to evaluate the authenticity of the evidence and to make confident reliable determinations on the plausibility of testimony.”
Defense attorney Tom Ullmann questioned Lively at that point. He asked if he’d had experience on a jury before, if he knew about courtroom procedure. No, Lively said, he didn’t. He didn’t realize that this was the standard method for presenting evidence in a case.
Ullmann asked if he felt he could keep himself open to evaluating evidence fairly. Lively responded that he could, but it wouldn’t be easy.
Then Judge Blue spoke to him, offering a lesson in how a trial works.
“At that point I knew I was in big trouble,” Lively said. “I didn’t want to get in big trouble. I had problems with the prosecution’s presentation and manner. I asked what I thought would be a confidential question. It became a public matter. I was afraid I was going to get kicked off the jury.”
His fear came true. Blue — visibly peeved at Lively, saying he had never seen an “interjection” like this one in his 21 years on the bench—dismissed him.
Lively, “embarrassed,” “disappointed,” headed out the door. “I naively thought I was going to go to my car in the garage and drive away.” Instead he encountered a posse of reporters and TV cameramen on the Church Street sidewalks. Alerted by the reporters upstairs in the courtroom, they already knew the news. They converged on Lively seeking comments.
“One of them steps on my shoe. My shoe comes off,” Lively recalled. “I’m shocked that they even knew.” He stopped to bend down, put his shoe back on. He refuses comment; the cameras roll, the questions continue. “Walking headlong into this phalanx of press people,” he made it to his car and drove home. After consulting with an attorney, he decided to ignore the calls for comment. He figured the matter would blow over.
It didn’t. And a caricature of him emerged in public, of a shirker trying any angle to avoid his civic duty. After church on Sunday he decided he needed to correct the record. So he made a phone call to the Independent and told his story — with the hope that his walk-on part in the trial of the year could finally reach its denouement.
Oh geez. My heart goes out to Mr. Lively, an obviously intelligent, ethical, thoughtful person who embarks on jury duty with the radical idea that the lawyers will have the same goals that he had as the editor of a Taunton Press magazine.
News for Mr. Lively -- as I'm sure you've now figured out: your magazines' mission was to instruct, inform, and give clear directions, to empower the reader to understand something and even make something.
The lawyers' approach to the jury, on the other hand, is to overwhelm your critical faculties, confuse you, and sweep you along till you stop thinking for yourself and just allow the lawyer to tell you what to think.