A Juror Who Struggled with the Death Penalty

Betsy Burbank cried as the verdict that she and her fellow jurors agreed on was read out loud in court Monday. It wasn’t the first time she’d broken into tears over the last four days.

Most mornings for the past eight weeks, Burbank, a 45-year-old interior designer and divorced mother of two sons, saw her son Sam off to school, then walked from her Humphrey Street home to the Church Street courthouse to consider the fate of one of two men accused of committing a triple murder.

She and her fellow jurors found Steven Hayes guilty of in the 2007 murders of Jennifer Hawke-Petit, and her daughters Hayley and Michaela at their Cheshire home in a particularly brutal attack that riveted the attention of the region. In relative terms, that was the simple part.

For four days, starting last Friday, they weighed whether to give Hayes the death penalty—a measure Burbank philosophically opposes. Monday afternoon they delivered their answer: yes.

At some point each of those four days, Burbank found herself in tears.

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