On Monday, the jurors had their verdict for the defendant, Steven J. Hayes, who had wreaked havoc at the Petit house in Cheshire, Conn. It had almost been expected from the start of the home-invasion trial: Death by lethal injection.
As the jurors began to talk publicly about their verdict on Monday night, they said they were certain of it and unified. They said there had never been a deep division on the panel and that the three and a half days of deliberation were to solemnly consider when capital punishment was warranted and then to work through the complexities of the pages of legal questions they had to answer.
But several of them said in interviews that sitting in the Cheshire home-invasion case had been a harrowing experience, thinking for weeks about the two parolees who broke into a suburban home in the middle of the night and killed a mother and her two daughters, beat and tied up the girls’ father and committed countless other offenses.
“It was a challenge to me to see if I have the courage and the strength of character,” said Diane N. Keim, 59, a special-education teacher from Madison. “Other than what you see in movies, I have not seen children burned.”
Herbert R. Gram, 77, also of Madison, said it was the hard-to-hear facts of the home invasion by two intruders with disturbing criminal pasts and the horrifying crime-scene photographs that made the case for capital punishment.
“I’ve seen a lot, and been a lot of places,” Mr. Gram said. “I’ve certainly seen death before.” Then he paused. “This was not easy. There was nothing easy about it.”
Some jurors mentioned that it was impossible to be in the courtroom day after day and not wonder, as they looked at Mr. Hayes, how many more people like him were out there willing to break all the rules and ruin people.
Elizabeth Burbank, 45, an interior designer from New Haven, said she could not help wondering how safe she and the people she loved truly were. “The idea of being invaded while you’re asleep, when you’re vulnerable — we can’t help but worry about it now,” she said.
She used to work in a prison, Ms. Burbank said, and she thought she had a thick enough skin to handle this case. But, she said, “Nothing can ever prepare you for this kind of thing.”
The daily inundation in topics most people do not have to think about took a toll, said Delores A. Carter, a retired health care worker from Hamden. “It was life changing,” she said. “You see everything in a whole new light after you’ve been through something like this.”
As the weeks of testimony went on, the toll on the jurors grew. “The weight just got heavier and heavier,” said Ian Cassell, 35, of New Haven, who was the jury foreman in the penalty phase of the trial.
By the time they had agreed on the death verdict, “all the jurors were really emotional,” Mr. Cassell said. It was a verdict based on the law, he said. “No one is happy. Nothing is better. Nothing is solved.”
The jurors said that reporters had completely misinterpreted the notes they handed court officials during deliberations on Friday and Saturday that seemed to suggest some of them were leaning toward accepting a defense argument that Mr. Hayes should be spared because of a defense claim that he was mentally impaired at the time of the crime.
They said those notes had been purely hypothetical, as they tried to work through confusing legal instructions about the many questions they were required to answer.
They said the jurors worked agreeably, and that three or four seemed particularly upset early in the deliberations at the prospect of voting for an execution. But they said they spent some of Friday and much of Saturday talking philosophically about when capital punishment was warranted.
Mr. Gram said the conversation veered broadly and included discussion of whether society had the right to take a life. In the end, he said, all the jurors agreed that if there was ever a case in which the death penalty was appropriate, the Cheshire case was it.
The sentiment was unanimous, he said. “It was just so heinous and just so over the top and depraved. Here is a case where somebody doesn’t deserve to remain on the face of the earth.”
After the verdict, most of the jurors met with Dr. William A. Petit Jr., who was beaten by the intruders and tied up while his wife and daughters were tormented and killed. After some of the jurors asked for the meeting after the verdict Monday, court officials quietly arranged for it in an out-of-the-way spot in the court building where the jurors and Petit family members had crossed paths for weeks.
Ms. Keim said the meeting was emotional, with jurors hugging members of the family, and Dr. Petit and members of the extended family thanking the jurors for the grueling task they had undertaken.
Ms. Keim said that on the worst days of the trial she had often had a sensation that she would never be able to do what she wanted to do for the Petits and their daughters, Hayley, 17, and Michaela, 11, who were killed after the worst night of their lives.
In the jury box, Ms. Keim said: “I just wanted to hold the girls. I wanted to take whatever they experienced before they died and take it away. But it wasn’t in my power.”
Ms. Keim said she would not forget something one of the girls’ grandmothers had said in the jurors’ meeting with the family members. The elderly woman told the jurors, “We’re so sorry we had to put you through this.”
Robert Davey and Elizabeth Maker contributed reporting.
