Courts Offer Counseling for Jurors After Grueling Cases

They are witnesses to depravity who often get forgotten once they leave the jury box.

Jurors in sensational trials--such as the 12 Orange County residents now deciding whether serial killer Charles Ng should die for his crimes--are forced to confront a haunting side of human nature. And what they see is often hard to shake.

Until recently, jurors left court with little more than a cursory “thank you” from the judge, forcing them to deal alone with the emotional aftereffects.

Increasingly, courts are heeding the advice of psychologists who warn of the harm that such disturbing trials can inflict on jurors.

As officials struggle to make jury service more palatable to a reluctant public, a growing number of courts from Los Angeles to Milwaukee are offering free counseling or “debriefing” sessions to help jurors understand the emotions they feel after long or harrowing cases.

Orange County does not provide the service, but court executive officer Alan Slater said he will try to arrange counseling for jurors if they request it. Budget concerns and the recent merger of the county’s Superior and Municipal courts have pushed the issue to the sidelines.

Members of the Ng jury have discussed visiting a counselor together after the trial, says a former juror on the case.

Lynne Glenn, who was dismissed from the panel last week for talking to an investigator outside the courtroom, said parts of the trial took a noticeable toll on her former colleagues.

They watched a courtroom television screen in horror as Ng tore away a terrified woman’s T-shirt shortly before her murder. They sat grimacing in the jury box as the woman on the videotape pleaded in vain for her baby boy’s life.

“You can’t go home to your family and talk about it. You can’t just walk out. . . . With this type of a trial, I think they should offer [counseling] to jurors,” said Glenn, a former grief counselor living in Santa Ana.

Authorities allege that Ng and Leonard Lake kidnapped and killed their victims for financial gain 14 years ago in a remote Northern California cabin. The trial was eventually moved to Santa Ana, where three men and nine women have been hearing the case since October. They convicted Ng on 11 counts of murder in February.

The jurors smile and joke with each other outside the courtroom. But the mood changes inside. Several jurors wept during video footage and testimony from victims’ families. They jerked back in horror at one point in a videotape when Lake suddenly pulled out a handgun.

“We were very lucky that we didn’t see that much gore,” Glenn added. “But to think about the fear that those ladies were going through on tape, that was very difficult to deal with.”

Indeed, studies over the last decade suggest that jurors who are exposed to graphic testimony or evidence may experience reactions that mirror those of witnesses to the crimes. Psychologists say jurors often complain later of feeling depressed and anxious, experiencing weight loss, insomnia, nightmares, tearfulness, headaches and disruptions in close relationships.

“The problem is: People just take it home when the trial is over, and if they just keep it inside their head, they can suffer for a long time,” said Jeffrey T. Mitchell, a professor of psychology at the University of Maryland.

One way to release such feelings, experts say, is to encourage jurors to talk about the emotions sparked by the case.

Counseling sessions for jurors were pioneered a decade ago and have now spread to courts nationwide. In the last few years, juror debriefing programs have been created in Los Angeles, Ventura and San Diego counties, and other jurisdictions in the state are considering the idea.

“There is this heightened awareness and sensitivity on the part of judges now to the effects of trials on people,” said Roger Bell, professor of psychiatry at the University of Louisville and a pioneer in the field of jury counseling.

Most of the debriefings are group sessions lasting a couple of hours soon after the trial’s end. Two-hour sessions cost about $350 to $500, usually paid by the courts.

Kentucky became one of the first states to create a permanent counseling program after Bell spoke to jurors following the 1989 manslaughter conviction of a drunk driver who rammed his pickup truck into a church bus, killing 17 people.

During the trial, jurors viewed grisly photos of maimed bodies at the scene.

Two years later, Bell counseled jurors who sat in judgment on a teacher found guilty of shooting and beheading his wife. One panelist told her colleagues she was plagued by visions from a police video that showed investigators digging up the head.

“Once we told her that that was a normal consequence of seeing an event like that,” Bell said, “and that she should talk about that, she looked at us and said, ‘You mean I’m not going crazy?’ And we said, ‘Of course not!’ ”

Bell also counseled jurors after the Milwaukee trial of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. For three weeks during the trial, the jury was separated from friends and families, left to dwell on graphic accounts of how Dahmer split open his victims, performed sex acts on their corpses and cannibalized some of them.

One of the jurors, Elba Duggins, recalled how she often struggled to fall asleep at night during the trial. But her strangest reaction to the case came a year and a half later, when she found herself at a seminar in the same hotel where she had been sequestered.

“For some reason,” she said, “I ended up in the bathroom crying. It blew me away. I said something to one of the women there, that it was the same hotel I had stayed in during the trial, and then I just lost it.”

Cases don’t have to be gory to trigger emotional stress in juries.

In Ventura County, Kris Sourbeer last year found herself on a jury in the trial of cop killer Michael Raymond Johnson. Jurors listened to gut-wrenching testimony from the family of the dead sheriff’s deputy. His widow testified that her 5-year-old daughter still asked when Daddy was coming home.

“That was horrible,” Sourbeer said. “They would talk about their pain, and I think they were probably encouraged to show emotion and not hold anything back. . . . At one point we were all crying.”

During the trial, Sourbeer felt irritable and lethargic, she said. Despite working as a school psychologist, she said she only recognized the symptoms of stress when she attended a debriefing session with some of the other jurors about a week after the case ended.

“I think [counseling] should be offered to everybody in stressful trials,” she said.

Times librarian Sheila A. Kern contributed to this story.