From the NHI: Petit juror says he didn't quit

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.”

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