For weeks last fall, until Steven Hayes was sentenced to death, Connecticut was riveted by testimony describing the nightmarish fate of the Petit family in Cheshire. The mother was strangled in 2007 after an ordeal that began when two men burst into the home, and her two girls, 11 and 17, died after being tied to their beds and the house was set ablaze.

Hayes’ co-defendant, Joshua Komisarjevsky, goes on trial Sept. 19. But as harrowing as the first trial was, it is becoming clear that the second will be even more disturbing.

The reason is a widely known Connecticut defense lawyer and lanky raconteur named Jeremiah Donovan. He has been conducting an aggressive defense in court filings and pretrial hearings that has included attacks on the jury, the judge, the media, the victims’ family — even the surviving victim, Dr. William Petit, the father.

The defense strategy is markedly different from the gentlemanly tack of Hayes’ lawyers. Thomas Ullmann, his chief lawyer, said the change was necessary.

“You’d be a fool to adopt the same strategy that we had,” Ullmann said, “because it was a failed strategy.”

The defense has signaled it will also reveal striking detail about the life of Komisarjevsky — “a damaged human being,” the defense says, with a mental disorder who endured “years of trauma and abuse.”

Mark Dubois, a veteran Connecticut lawyer and law professor, said the “scorched-earth defense” seemed intended to provoke mistakes by the trial judge or others that would lead to a new trial and a new chance to avoid a death sentence years from now.

The provocations seem aimed largely at the judge, Jon Blue of Superior Court in New Haven. Donovan tried but failed to have him removed from the case with claims that Blue lacked objectivity and had an “unsuitable temperament,” evidenced by an incident in which the judge gave spectators chocolate-chip cookies he had baked.

Donovan said the court order barring him from speaking prevented him from granting an interview for this article. But he has said previously that he and his co-counsel, Walter Bansley and Todd Bussert, were — with their client — the “most hated men in Connecticut.”

But some lawyers argue that his willingness to stand by Komisarjevsky upholds the highest traditions of their profession.

Diane Polan, a New Haven defense lawyer who tried a murder case with Donovan a few years ago, said, “There were a lot of people who wouldn’t touch that case.”