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High Court, Christchurch - Source: ONE News -
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Seven women and five men watched exhibit after exhibit of grisly evidence at the David Bain retrial and after 56 days in the jury box, their lives will never be the same again.
No one knows the pressure the jury felt while deliberating their verdict better than someone who has been there and ONE News has spoken to a juror from the first trial.
"Anna" has given an insight into what it is like to be a juror in such a trial and how to cope with the evidence put before the court.
Jurors had to watch the gruesome scenes police found inside 65 Every Street, Dunedin - graphic images ONE News cannot show viewers but from which the jury had no reprieve.
"I think it would have been nice to be warned at how bad it was," Anna says.
The former juror still lives with the images today - 14 years on from her time in the jury box.
"I can still see some of the pictures that were shown and...they talk about the evidence...and I can actually visualise it."
Noelle Robertson is an expert on the psychology of juries and says people will talk about having intrusive images of evidence they have seen in the trial.
"They'll talk about a restlessness, an agitation, and often sleeplessness," says Dr Robertson.
Anna says the first jurors did have some group counselling sessions and she underwent some one-on-one treatment as well.
But she says the period of enforced silence was tough.
"It's like you can't sleep, you can't eat."
ONE News showed Robertson a story from the day the police video was played to the retrial and she says it is possible gruesome evidence could affect a jury's decision making.
"We know at a very basic level that when you are anxious you focus very much on central elements of what you're seeing and lose a lot of peripheral detail," says Robertson.
The Ministry of Justice's "guide to jury trial practice" acknowledges that some jurors "have real difficulty coping with the stress of jury service". And it says while jurors should be given information on how to seek counselling, it's up to them to seek it.
"A few years ago in the UK when we had the Fred and Rosemary West trial... I talked to a couple of journalists in the aftermath of that who said they had been routinely offered counselling because they had been exposed to this material...I'm not certain that was offered to the jury," says Robertson.
"If you can't debrief in any way then you are holding onto all that fairly unpleasant material with no opportunity to let that go and it must be hugely isolating."
Anna says you can't talk to anybody - friends or family.
The house at 65 Every Street is gone but Anna will never forget what unfolded inside.
"We've never been able to move on, it's never been fully finished, people are still talking about it, it's like will it just go away," she says.
"I've had enough."
