I can tell you what my experience is, which is that it is completely inconsistent. I know some judges do debrief with the jury and give the follow-up information, so for some trials I've been involved in, a number of the jurors showed up for the sentencing hearing. For some trials, none did, and I doubt that there was any debriefing at the end.
You've heard the evidence from jurors about what would be helpful or not helpful, but to the extent that that is going to become part of the process, I think that training judges on how to do that and providing them with support if they do not feel comfortable doing it would be important. If someone else is going to do it, if you're going to have a facilitator, you still run into the section 649 problem, because there may well be discussion in that debriefing that would run afoul of section 649. The one thing that does happen in every jury trial I've ever done is that, at the beginning of the trial, the very first thing jurors are told is that it's a criminal offence to disclose the contents of their deliberation, and usually the very last thing they're told before they leave the courtroom is, “Thank you for your service. It's a criminal offence for you to discuss the contents of your deliberations.”
That is absolutely the clear message, and so I think you need to do something to help jurors navigate what that means. I think if I were a juror completely untrained, I would think that I couldn't talk about any of it with anybody ever in any context. When they are trying to navigate some psychiatric symptom as a result of the trial process or this or that and figure out what's captured or not, I think the message would be that it's all covered, and I don't think they would be wrong in that interpretation.
My experience is inconsistent. If you're going to recommend that this be a consistent practice, I think there needs to be appropriate training.