Graphic pictures in recent trial spur question: Should jurors have access to post-trial counseling? / By Maria Sprow

Can jurors suffer from post-traumatic stress?

Sharon Cave, the mother of murder victim Jennifer Cave, whose body was horribly mutilated on Aug. 18, 2005, believes they can – and after waging a campaign to seek help for jurors suffering from the issue, she’s got letters and evidence to support her case. “I reside in Harris County, and I was the jury forewoman for a particularly horrible murder case here a few years ago. The victim was a 16 year old girl, shot three times – her name was Kaci Fink. I’ll never forget her name or face as long as I live,” wrote Portia Smith, whose name has been changed, in a letter to the Austin American Statesman, after reading news of Sharon’s plea to get jurors access to free counseling services. “I will never be able to get the morgue images of Kaci out of my head, or the faces of her family. Or the tears and testimony of the friend who survived, or the man who first came to the scene and found her in her car.

“Once the trial was over, I figured everything was finished. I was totally wrong. We delivered our verdict on the Friday before Mother’s Day. By June, I was in full-on nervous breakdown. My husband had no idea how to deal with me. I was emotional, overwrought, self destructive, crying all the time,” the letter states. “I finally went to the Employee Assitance Program therapist provided by my employer, and she helped me understand that I was suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, a direct result of the emotional trauma of the trial. … I never realized that was even a possibility. To this day, I wish I had been better prepared, or that counseling had been offered.” Thanks to Sharon, those letters and stories are making their way to the Capitol building and into the nationwide media. Before her daughter’s murder, Sharon hadn’t considered herself politically active. She had attended some city council meetings, some school board meetings, other school functions, but had never thought she’d be the figurehead behind legislation, or that she would spend weeks traveling to and from the capitol on an issue she spearheaded.

But there she was, late at night on April 11, having traveled from Corpus Christi to wait all day for a House subcommittee hearing, scheduled for 2 p.m. or “upon adjournment.” When the meeting finally got underway at 8 p.m., Sharon waited patiently for Rep. Allen Vaught to get to her cause – HB 3416, a bill that would “allow” counties to offer up to 10 hours of post-trial counseling for certain jurors. When Sharon stood to testify, Rep. Vaught greeted her like an old friend. She was, by then, a familiar face.

“One of the things I was most concerned about when we were getting ready to go to trial was the jury,” Sharon Cave told Vaught and others in the room. “You have to trust those jurors … to do the right thing.”

She added that she feels, in her daughter’s case at least, the jurors did the right thing, but suffered in the process. “They had to sit there every day and watch my pain,” she said, while handing Vaught a pile of news articles, letters and other communications she has gathered on the issue of juror stress, adding that she wished the jurors had had access to counseling.

“I think it’s a great idea,” Rep. Vaught agreed. “It’d be good if we could support our jurors.”

The Jennifer Cave murder case was particularly gruesome. For seven days – four days of testimony, a weekend and a day of deliberations – jurors heard every discernable detail of a horrible tale, in which a 24-year-old man killed a beautiful 21-year-old woman, his friend, without reason, and then proceeded to try and cover up the murder by cutting apart the body with a hacksaw and sticking body parts into a garbage bag.

Jurors became immersed in that story; it was their jobs, their lives. They heard the testimony. They watched the families. They saw the pictures – pictures that even a hardened Court TV reporter described as gruesome. (In her online blog, Jean Casarez, the reporter, writes “Some jurors looked as though they wanted to find a way to get out of the courtroom. I looked and then looked away. You just can’t keep looking at the reality of what happened to Jennifer. …. Jim Sedwick, the man who found Jennifer’s body, must have thought he had the strength to view the images. But when the first picture of her headless corpse flashed on the screen, he jumped up and literally ran out the door. … This is a case I will never forget.”) Sharon never saw the pictures the jury saw. She was told not to look; descriptions are graphic enough. But she saw the impact the trial had on the jury members, so she turned to her local representative, Juan Garcia, and has been talking with him and his staff ever since. “one girl came in (when the trial began), she was very bubbly. you could tell she had a mission in life, she had come in to do her service,” Sharon told members of the House Criminal Procedure Subcommittee on April 11. “We saw them deteriorate everyday.”

Alan Stuber was one of those jurors Sharon saw everyday. An engineering consultant from Austin in his every day life, getting pulled out of his day job to view what he described as “horrifi c” pictures was diffi cult. “It was stressful for the other jurors, and it was for me too,” he said. “It was a horrifi c crime and to see the reactions of the families, both the reactions of the victim’s family and defendant’s family. It really cut hard on people.”

He said the biggest problem for him was not being able to talk about the evidence while the two sides worked their way through the trial. “you see all these horrific scenes and you can’t do much to process that information,” he said, several months after the trial had ended. “I think there was about seven or eight pictures that were disturbing or very graphic. … Th ere were at least three pictures that defi nitely stick in my mind out of the ones that were shown.” Stuber contacted Ms. Cave after reading media reports about the introduced legislation. He wanted to thank her for taking the time to care about jurors. “I think it’s a good idea. I’m not in favor of a lot of additional government programs, but at the same time, the state is compelling you to take part in trials like this, and if they are going to do that, they should off er some help in dealing with the information that you’ve seen,” he said, adding that he felt some members of his jury could have benefi ted from the service.

But he added he probably wouldn’t have taken advantage of such a service, as introduced in the legislation. He said he would also be in favor of jurors receiving information with regards to how to deal with stress and trauma prior to the beginning of trials.

Of the few places around the nation that do off er post-trial counseling for jurors, there are only a few formalized processes. Th e legislation is similar to the process in King County, Washington, where the district attorney’s offi ce contracts with a local mental health center to provide post-trial counseling to some jurors. Th e counseling is off ered at the discretion of the trial judge. A court in Wisconsin off ered post trial counseling to jurors in the Jeff rey Dahmer case in the early 1990s; courts in Georgia and Kentucky have also reportedly off ered counseling in the past. Jurors in Westchester County in new york requested that the county pay for post-trial psychological counseling and a debriefi ng after they served on a sexual abuse case – the case began in March 1985 and was the longest in the county’s history, lasting until the beginning of 1986.

Though counties want to help their jurors, but few currently have the resources. Th e local offi ce most equipped to off er counseling, according to legislation generated as a result of the Jennifer Cave case, is the county crime victim liaison or assistant, who handles the needs – including the coordination of counseling – of victims, their families and witnesses. But many of those offi ces are understaff ed, overworked and underfunded as is.

Travis County is the one of the few District Attorney’s offi ces in the nation to have off ered post-trial counseling to jurors. Ellen Halbert, the county’s Victim Witness Director, said she believes off ering post-trial counseling to jurors is a good idea, though not as simple as it seems.

“We’ve had a service for a couple of years here, but it is really rarely used,” she said, adding that the service is unlike the proposed legislation. Instead, in Travis County, generally what happens is a district judge will tell members of the jury that if they want to talk to someone, they can call the county’s victim witness division. “now and then, someone will call here and then someone will call them back. usually we just talk to them over the telephone,” Halbert said. “It’s really about counseling them about what they’ve seen. Sometimes we’ll talk to them two or three times, and on rare occasion someone will come into the office.”

The service was not immediately promoted to jurors in the Jennifer Cave case, and the county has not, in the past, kept track of when the service was off ered and used. “We didn’t off er it, simply because the energy of the case and all the things that happened with it, it just didn’t come up. Everything was very hectic in the end and we were just so glad the case was over,” Halbert said.

“The great thing about the bill is that it’s got people talking about the need for counseling for some jurors.” Halbert said she became close with Sharon Cave before and during the trial, but she said she does have some reservations about the bill, especially with funding. She has been speaking with members of Rep. Juan Garcia’s staff, attempting to convince them that, without funding, the legislation will become an unfunded mandate, whether intentional or not.

“You cannot expect a district attorney’s office to provide counseling services in every single county in the state. Most jurisdictions don’t have the kind of resources that we have, and there are some rural counties where their victim services person may have 10 other jobs,” she said. “This service is going to have to be funded by the state. If there is funding, then a victim advocate could partner with maybe a local nonprofit who works has counselors, or … I don’t know. But in order for the bill to work, for jury counseling to actually take place, they will need to find funding.”

Several counties provided data for the bill’s fiscal note. Harris County, which stated that it has never before offered post-trial counseling to jurors, noted that there are “about 100 trials annually for the types of offenses to which the bill would apply” and that if all the jurors requested counseling, and counseling cost from $75 to $90 per hour, the county could end up spending $900,000 a year on the service. In Bexar County, there were 69 jury trials in 2005 that would have fallen under the legislation; if half the juries involved in those trials requested counseling, and counselors were paid $90 an hour, the county estimated it would spend $465,750 on the service. Garcia said it’s not his intention to create an unfunded mandate for counties, though as of April 15, the legislation does not mention a funding source. “It would be a way to thank them for their service and help them to transfer back into their normal lives,” he said. Sharon Cave agreed that counties should not have to pay for the counseling services, especially if a county does not have the in-house therapists available to handle the need itself.

“We cannot overwork an already overworked victims services department,” Sharon said, noting the needs of victims’ families must be first priority. “Personally, I think funding should come from the Crime Victim’s Compensation Fund. When criminals are fined… they need to do more than just do the time, they need to pay for everything. If you commit a violent crime, you need to be aware that you have hurt more than just one family.”

She added that though her ultimate goal is to see the legislation passed in Texas, it’s also to encourage counties statewide and across the country to begin thinking of ways to help jurors. “From what we understand, there aren’t any counties (offering juror counseling),” she said. “We haven’t seen that, and that’s what we are trying to get on the ball with, with this bill. If you have something in place, promote it, and it not, we have to put something in place.”

The legislation recommends that up to 10 hours of counseling be offered to jurors involved in disturbing or horrific cases. But there are other alternatives.

Some district judges in Oregon have been offering jurors twohour therapy-focused debriefing sessions on a discretionary basis since 1998, through the state’s Department of Justice Crime Victims’ Assistance Section.. Ordinarily, the debriefings are needed about four to five times a year, said Janvier Slick, part of the twomember team that does the sessions upon request. The debriefings are voluntary for jurors and are ordinarily held about five to seven days after a trial ends, in order to give jurors time to collect their thoughts about a case.

Slick said it’s helpful to speak with jurors about post-traumatic stress, trauma and symptoms, and to ask the jurors if they’ve noticed any symptoms or if they found anything about the trial particularly troubling. “Some people, they experience affects physically. They have trouble sleeping, they have trouble sleeping, they have trouble eating, or they overeat. Depending on the nature of the case, like in a child abuse case, they often have a child in their lives that may be similar or similar in age to the victim, and they may worry. In some cases, they are physically afraid for themselves, they are afraid that if they live in the community, they may run into family members of the defendant,” she said.

For counties and district attorney offices, funding isn’t the only issue with offering post-trial counseling or debriefing services to jurors. Infrastructure is also an open-ended question. Who should counseling be offered to? Should judges take the initiative to offer the service to certain jurors, or should it somehow be promoted to all jurors, who would have to take the initiative to contact the office themselves? Should counties use internal resources, or contract with nearby mental health professionals, or licensed therapists? What about state resources that could be used, such as in Oregon? What if the service is abused or over-used?

Those familiar with the concept of post-trial counseling or debriefing and need for such a service said they expected very few jurors would request counseling or would seek help because of something arising from jury service.

“Jurors frequently were having difficulty dealing with the evidence that was presented to them,” said Sharon Buckley, a retired victim witness counselor from the Travis County District Attorney’s Office, to members of the House subcommittee. She added that Travis County has counseled only a few jurors in the past. “I think if (jurors) were aware (of the service)… the number would be a little bit higher. I still think that many of them would go to their own family or their own minister and get help there, but I think it would be a great idea if they had something else, because some people don’t have a support system.”