Justice committee  I think it applies to both. I've heard from jurors who have sat in those cases and said that they're extremely difficult. In some cases, the witness testimony is as impactful as the visual testimony in difficult civil cases, so they're experiencing the same degrees of stress. Yo

Justice committee  Absolutely.

Justice committee  That was one of the recommendations in the report. That came up through witness testimony. I, for one, can express my own experience as a juror. I was baffled by the lack of clear documentation when I sat down in my seat to begin the trial. Some jurors have voiced that they didn'

Justice committee  I'll certainly be talking about it as much as I can. There are a host of jurors behind me, many from whom you've heard. Every day, jurors approach me through social media or through correspondence to thank me and to voice their concerns because cases continue to be presented in c

Justice committee  I think so. I think it will. I think jurors have a very clear understanding of what is expected of them coming out of the courtroom in terms of secrecy and their responsibility to honour and maintain that secrecy. The difficulty that many faced was in contracting mental health o

Justice committee  Certainly. To your point, it's not necessarily the traumatic and graphic images—in some ways, those are obvious and they do stick with you—but the procedure itself and the legal challenge. I know of a juror who felt incredible guilt and anxiety because an acquittal was the result

Justice committee  On the first question, there are provinces now that have a juror support program in place, albeit these are limited in the number of sessions the ministry of the attorney general of that province provides to the juror. In Ontario, for example, there's a toll-free counselling lin

Justice committee  Thank you to members of this committee for once again inviting me to speak here today. I would like to thank this committee and its members who listened to the concerns of ordinary Canadians and acted upon those concerns. We're here because former jurors from across the country,

Justice committee  I think that's very accurate.

Justice committee  Imagine being a juror in a criminal trial involving organized crime, in which there are multiple defendants and multiple parties and multiple gangs involved in a highly brutal act. You are driving your car to a small courthouse. You are parking your car next to witnesses from tho

Justice committee  I think the selection and challenge process you are speaking of is often unique to the case in court at the time. In the case I ended up on as a juror, our panel was selected within a week, if not just a few days. It was a very quick selection process. The only question we were a

Justice committee  It was an intervention for me, in essence. I knew there was something wrong with me. I was not alien to it, but I was again hoping it would go away. But as I got worse my family became more and more concerned, particularly my wife and my sister. It took somebody to shake me and s

Justice committee  I don't want what happened to me to happen to somebody else, in the sense that I served my civic duty as a juror and then did not have the adequate support post-trial to allow me to come to terms with the imagery and experience that I went through and to be able to return to my l

Justice committee  Jurors are pre-screened. I can only speak to the province of Ontario, but the potential citizen pool is issued a questionnaire in advance, which all are expected to fill out and return. There is a series of questions about reasons you might be excluded or exempted from the tria

Justice committee  I was in what is called a state-of-the-art courtroom. In that case, there are large-scale monitors in front of each of the jurors. There are two very large television screens, one facing the public gallery and another one facing the court. Most of the evidence you're seeing in th