Justice committee  That would absolutely be my initial recommendation. It would be to change it so that the restriction is lifted. However, in the interest of knowing how things sometimes work within government, I'm suggesting baby steps. That absolutely would be my initial recommendation, but if

Justice committee  That's right.

Justice committee  Yes. I think that this remains a problem in the United States as well. It drastically affects the jury pool when you have employers who aren't paying and you have trials that are lasting weeks, months, and years sometimes. The pool of people who can actually serve becomes very, v

Justice committee  I hear two separate questions. There's the jury selection question: do you have a role, if you think somebody is going to have a mental breakdown because of the nature of the case, to ask to remove that juror? That's one question. The other question I have a quicker answer to,

Justice committee  That's what I was going to clarify, because it takes a while for the symptoms to manifest themselves.

Justice committee  Yes.

Justice committee  I think that's a great idea. It could be a short, scaled survey ranking things from 1 to 5—you know, “applies to me”, “doesn't apply to me”—and a series of yes-or-no questions. I think it would be valuable for two reasons. One is that we could learn about this individual juror, b

Justice committee  I think it's twofold. First, what other jurors say or do is part of the deliberations. It's part of what jurors are precluded from speaking about under section 649, even with the people doing the debriefing, so I think that's the policy implication there: changing the ban on th

Justice committee  Not necessarily. I think it's possible to identify people who, because of the way they talk about their experiences, generally give you a sense of whether or not they are past it and have moved on, versus if they are clearly expressing some emotion still attached to describing th

Justice committee  I think there is a stigma associated with seeking mental health advice and counselling. I think one way to increase the number of people using these resources is to normalize the response from the beginning by saying, “This could very well happen to you, and there are resources i

Justice committee  I know there's a concern about expanding jury selection in Canada. You hear the horror stories in the United States about jury selection going on for days and weeks, and people trying to craft a certain jury. I don't agree with that assessment, but I'm also not suggesting that yo

Justice committee  A study was done in 1998 by the National Center for State Courts. I replicated many aspects of that in my research. What was interesting was that the ban on discussing the case during the trial and some aspects of the deliberation were less stressful in that sample, and I believe

Justice committee  Yes.

Justice committee  Yes, absolutely there's a potential. It all comes down to the warning given to the jurors and letting the jurors know the potential consequences. We're running into that in the United States, and here as well, with jurors looking up things on their smart phones online, even when

Justice committee  Good afternoon. My name is Sonia Chopra. I received my Ph.D. in psychology, with an emphasis on psychology and law, from Simon Fraser in 2002. I've since worked as a litigation consultant in the United States for the last 15 years. In my role as a consultant, I assist attorneys i