Secondary Trauma and Juries
Larry Mahoney and the Carollton Bus Crash
Today will be a bad day for me, and tomorrow. As an attorney – and an attorney in Massachusetts, where confidentiality rules are enforced a bit more vigorously – I can’t talk or write about why.
I haven’t arrived at a conclusion about whether that makes it harder or easier.
Let’s push all of that aside, shall we, and go down a rabbit hole. In the Hunt, we’ve written about a court order entered at the request of a jury, protecting them from contact with the defendant, defendant’s counsel, or investigators.
So.
Jurors.
Jurors are ordinary people, summoned from their homes, stolen from their lives, and made to sit and watch and listen to whatever evidence and testimony the judge permits the attorneys to present. And this evidence is, wherever possible, by good attorneys, presented in a way designed to be not only remembered, but felt.
Dispute resolution by legalized kidnapping and mandatory theater, the crown jewel of our democracy.1
Despite all the jokes about “getting out of jury duty,” there is no opt-out list. Prospective jurors don’t get to thumb through the docket like a menu, and say to the court officer “I’m in the mood for something civil; nothing too gory, or with too much math,” or “Please just nothing where something bad happened to anyone who reminds me of my granddaughter.”
In fact, quite often, jurors are selected by counsel based on the belief that they will have a strong reaction to some particular piece of evidence; that the scraps of demographic information provided to counsel in the fifteen or twenty minutes before empanelment can provide a preview of which side a juror may favor.
Despite that, jurors tend to be very good at their jobs. They swear to be neutral and unbiased. They listen intently. They think. They care.
The experience, particularly in criminal cases, can be intense. The potential for secondary trauma arising from juror service in criminal cases has been acknowledged with increasing frequency over the years.2
…
It wouldn’t be a proper rabbithole if we didn’t go back in time. There’s nothing better than research to soothe the jangled nerves. So let’s figure out when this conversation started. Perhaps there’s a story there.
The earliest citations and articles I can find, concerning secondary or vicarious trauma in jurors, in law reviews and scientific journals, date to the early 1990s3. An article in the Indiana Law Journal published in 1993 includes an apology about the relatively thin source material and this intriguing footnote:
The one law review note specifically on point primarily discusses a Carrollton, Kentucky, case, probably the first reported debriefing of jurors. Marjorie O. Dabbs, Note, Jury Traumatization in High Profile Criminal Trials: A Case for Crisis Debriefing?, 16 LAW & PSYCHOL. REV. 201 (1992).
The debriefing was ordered by trial court judge Charles Satterwhite of the Fifteenth Judicial Circuit in Kentucky after a highly publicized six-week trial resulting from the worst alcohol related traffic accident in U.S. history. An intoxicated driver of a pickup truck crashed into a church school bus and killed 27 persons, most of them students.
Judge Satterwhite reported that he got the idea of offering post-verdict counseling to jurors from an article he read during the trial about the debriefing of families of crime victims. He decided that the jurors, who he could see were visibly shaken and emotionally distraught during the trial, would need similar assistance. On his own initiative, the judge contacted professionals who had conducted psychological debriefing in other crisis situations.
Here’s my rabbithole. What was this case, and why was it so disturbing that it changed the way we see jury service?
The name of the judge – Satterwhite – yielded a few short bios on local bar association websites, and an old story from United Press International.4 The story concerned a decision to exclude evidence relating to settlements between bereaved families and Ford Motor Company in a criminal trial. It fit the footnote. And even better, it contained the name of the defendant, the town where the accident occurred, and the year.
Newspapers.com (god it’s lovely) filled in the rest of the blanks.5 Most of the following information is from the fantastic reporting in the Courier-Journal of Louisville, Kentucky, which received a Pulitzer Prize for the coverage.
Late on Saturday night, May 14, 1988, a youth group was returning from “Kings Island” amusement park, in an eleven-year old, second-hand school bus, when it was struck, head-on, by a Toyota pickup truck driven by Larry Mahoney.
The bus was rocked by a series of explosions, starting at the front. Forty people managed to evacuate, via the rear door and windows. Four adults and twenty-three children and teenagers died, primarily of smoke inhalation and burns. State Troopers recalled that the dead were found “piled atop one another,” as they’d tried to get to the back to escape.
During the trial, the defense attempted to pursue a theory that the deaths weren’t caused by the impact itself, but by the design of the bus, which included flammable seats, too few exits, and an unprotected fuel tank, resulting in a design defense counsel referred to as “a rolling tin can with a bomb underneath.”
Using evidence and testimony from state troopers, the medical examiner, coroner, first responders, and hired experts, the defense presented evidence that each death was caused by smoke inhalation, or fire, rather than impact. This theory meant that for two months, the jury sat and listened to experts describe the cause and manner of death of children. In precise, scientific detail.
Press reports detail the emotional impact on first responders, police, the accident reconstructionist, and coroners’ office. The state trooper who led the investigation suffered a “breakdown” after trial.
Judge Satterwhite explained his decision to order post-verdict counseling in interviews, saying that he worried about the jurors. He didn’t know how they would be able to resume their lives.
Jurors said it helped.
I hope it did.
I mean it. There’s no more critical role. Litigation is a game of chicken until the jury is sworn.
“Jurors’ Emotional Reactions to Serving on Capital Juries.” https://secure.in.gov/ipdc/files/judicature-article-on-juries.pdf
“Juror Reactions to Jury Duty, Perceptions of the System and Potential Stressors. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredir=1&article=1159&context=psychfacpub
“It Broke Me, Jurors can experience PTSD years after traumatic trials, experts say,” https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/jurors-experience-ptsd/
Jurors report experiencing trauma after South Carolina death penalty trial.
Helping Jurors Out: Post-Verdict Debriefing for Jurors in Emotionally Disturbing Trials.
https://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1568&context=ilj
Who is taking care of the Jurors? Helping Jurors after traumatic trials.
Anecdotal discussion, however, goes back much further. In Commonwealth v. Jordan, 207 Mass. 259 (1911), a juror was committed to an asylum the day after returning a verdict, reportedly, from the “stress and strain of trial.”
https://www.upi.com/Archives/1989/12/18/Judge-denies-defense-motion-on-Ford-settlement/3410629960400/
At this point, I could have googled. It turns out there’s even a wikipedia page. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrollton_bus_collision
It’s brutal, though.